Knights of the Rebellion
by skywalker05
Summary: When the Exile and Carth find Revan after KOTORII, they and some of their companions are thrown forward in time to a pivotal moment in the Galactic Civil War. Pairings include HanLeia, LSFRevanCarth, and FExileMical or FExileBao.
1. The Exile and the Redeemed

**Knights of the Rebellion**

"Definition: 'Love' is making a shot to the knees of a target 120 kilometers away using an Aratech sniper rifle with a tri-light scope. Statement: This definition, I am told, is subject to interpretation. Obviously, love is a matter of odds. Not many meatbags could make such a shot, and fewer would derive love from it. Yet for me, love is knowing your target, putting them in your targeting reticle, and together, achieving a singular purpose, against statistically long odds." HK-47

**Chapter 1**

**about one year after the events of Knights of the Old Republic II**

The woman who had once called herself Darth Revan lay on her back in the grass on Dantooine, looking up at the clear, blue sky.

Her eyes were unfocused. Occasionally she cast her gaze about the surrounding landscape or over her own red-and-gold clothing, but otherwise she remained very still. Peace enfolded her mind, peace she had needed for a long time. Through the Force she knew the parades of insects which crawled over the ground, the majestic floating creatures in the air, and the footsteps and thoughts of the group of people headed in her direction.

But what amazed her most was that through all of these things, she knew herself. Not as a woman bent on revenge, not as a Force-user, nor as a conqueror. She simply knew herself as the person who woke up each morning and wanted a nice cup of caf to warm her hands around…knew herself by her real name.

Casual musing changed to intent alertness as she realized exactly who was coming her way. She turned over and crouched, some pieces of blue-black hair falling over her eyes, but when she realized how silly that half-alert state looked, she flopped onto her stomach and relaxed again with her feet in the air. These people certainly would bring some excitement to her life.

And she almost resisted the flood of emotions for _him_.

Force, this day was getting interesting.

**Anna Sacul, the **so-called Jedi Exile, felt insignificant beside the heroes she was about to meet.

It was not that her own life had been easy or unadventurous. Since the destruction of Malachor V, she had been living with the weight of the galaxy on her shoulders every day; her choices were not as clear-cut as light side and dark side. They asked her what war was worth, to what point did going far for your friends mean betraying their cause, and whether honor really existed. She had felt the dark side as if she were drowning in it at Malachor, but had still been able to kill Darth Traya—Kreia—when she had no other choice. She knew herself as a nexus in the Force, almost an object, which drew people to it and turned them to its own ways. It had given her loyal friends, even after she had been away from the Jedi Order for so long.

And a guilt weighed on her.

It had been clever of Admiral Carth Onasi to search Republic travel data—a daunting task, even for a droid made for research—for Revan's name or a likely fake one. And it had been convenient that he had needed a private ship and asked Anna and the members of her crew who were still left to take him to find her.

And, the Exile had had to ask, the former Sith was not on some obscure Outer Rim world battling shadowy forces of evil? Nope. She was, apparently, lounging on Dantooine.

Carth began to walk quickly as Revan came into view. Anna hung back with Bao-Dur and Mical. She had grown close to her two loyal apprentices over the last year and, even though Atton Rand was unable to accompany her because of an injury, they came. Anna felt more comfortable with them than she did with almost anyone. All three of them had remained quiet, though, throughout the voyage to reunite the heroes.

Revan rose when Carth approached. Anna had blurry memories of the Jedi General as a commanding woman not much older than herself, with impeccable charisma and the ability to inspire her troops with only a few sentences. The Mandalorians feared her.

And although Anna was on par with most Mandalorians in terms of combat skill, she did too. How, she wondered, could Revan be content with all that she had done? And what of her mission to the Outer Rim? Was Anna about to get herself embroiled in another war with Sith?

When she really looked at Revan now, the older Jedi appeared to be a rather short, trim woman. She wore a red outfit with a utility belt, a lightsaber hung through a belt loop on either side of her hips. She had short, functional hair like Anna's, although it was an almost-blue black and very straight, unlike Anna's perpetually ruffled blonde hair.

Revan stepped toward Carth as if she were going to hug him, then relaxed and simply smiled. They looked at each other for a long moment.

"I've missed you," he said.

She smiled wider, and Anna had the distinct urge to look away. From what the Force was giving her, she could tell that these two were attached to one another—but Revan's emotions were more complicated than that. But apparently, Carth picked that up too despite his lack of Force-sensitivity.

He asked, "Where…have you been? You were gone for so long; when I tracked you here it was almost like…did you ever leave?"

"I did," she said. She gracefully sat down on the grass and gestured for at least Carth to join her. Anna approached, and sat on her knees in front of her fellow Jedi Master. "I went to the Outer Rim, looking for what I had imagined lurked out there. But…what I found wasn't True Sith. It was just old worlds and stars, stars forever.

"I may have imagined all of that about the True Sith, or they are hiding better than I foresaw. I was very disappointed for a time…but someone helped me out of that." Revan looked up at Anna. "Nice to see you again, Anna Sacul. Your rank almost matches mine now, doesn't it?"

"In name if not in prowess, er, Revan," Anna replied, bowing politely.

"My name is Gwen Bolwyn," the other woman said graciously. "Revan was…a part of me. But I imagine that you too have felt the call of the dark side. We are past that. Our names are our own, are they not?

"And who do you bring with you?"

"My apprentices, Mical and Bao-Dur. Bao-Dur served with us at…at Malachor."

The Iridonian Zabrak politely inclined his head to Revan, but did not speak.

Said Mical, "It's an honor to meet you. I've heard so much…I've studied, I mean. I am a historian, not a monger of rumors. Your story is…breathtaking. Sweeping."

"Thank you?" Revan chuckled. "As a _life_…perhaps sweeping is indeed an appropriate word."

She stood up and extended a hand to Carth. Anna and her companions followed the two across the verdant field and into an area shaded by blba trees and two of the distinctive low Dantooinian plateaus. A small starship crouched in an alcove created by the risen ground, its gray skin dappled by the sun through the leaves.

Out of it leapt a small, blue Twi'lek, followed by a lumbering Wookiee.

"Mission!" Carth exclaimed. "And Zaalbar! I thought you two were out being tour guides somewhere."

"We tried," said the teenage Twi'lek. "But when Gwen's ship passed through…we knew she needed help. She didn't, not all that much, but that's what getting good at stowing away is for."

The Wookiee barked the staccato laughs of its kind, and Revan also chuckled again. "They really did help me," she said. "They taught me to laugh at myself. You have to, sometimes, even when you make mistakes as big as a Jedi Master's tend to be."

"I would think a Jedi Master would make fewer mistakes than other people," said Bao-Dur. He looked at the ship instead of at Revan's eyes, as if appraising it.

"Oh, we do make fewer mistakes. But when we make them…they're big. Galaxy-scale."

Anna could not tell from the Force or from Revan's tone of voice whether she was joking or being serious.

"Many people wonder where you are now," Carth began.

Revan replied, "And I think that many people, out of a whole Galactic Republic, looking out for _me _counts as enough of an excuse to avoid being found." Her voice took on a more serious, softer tone then, and the Force told of her deep calm. "And the Mandalorian Wars are over, as is the Jedi Civil War, Force curse the concept of one of those. The galaxy as a whole doesn't need me anymore, whereas, I needed to find myself. As they say. And…of course I did not want to be completely alone…" She looked up at Carth for a moment, her eyes shining, but he failed to respond promptly enough and she simply took his hand again to guide the group, including Mission and Zaalbar, around the back of the ship.

"Ironically enough, I did find something interesting on this planet." In the shadowed place behind the ship's starboard side, the wall of the plateau was not made of natural dirt as it should be. Instead a slab of rock, marble-like in appearance but shining like water even with the shadows on it, had been set into the side of the plateau. In the center there was a turquoise stone apparently suspended in thin air. When Revan took the stone from its place, a golden, claw-shaped socket behind it was revealed.

Anna immediately knew that the stone was imbued with the Force. The life energy of each person in the group whirlpooled around it, swirling and emitting an impression somehow opposite to that of destiny. However, it was not a dark side object, but a neutral one.

"Huh," Carth said under his breath.

"What…does it do?" asked Anna.

"I don't know." Revan replied. "Nothing, so far. But I think it can be opened further, if the mechanism was discovered."

"Ask Bao-Dur to try it," Anna suggested.

The stone was handed over to the Zabrak. He looked at it and squeezed it.

"I'll have to get my tools from the _Hawk_," said Bao-Dur. "But I may be able to get this open."

"Ah, the _Ebon Hawk_," said Revan as they all walked across the savannah again toward the ship. "I owned her once, did you know?"

"Admiral Onasi told me he had flown with you," Anna said. She still felt like she should tack an honorific onto her sentences for Revan, but did not know what it should be. Master, perhaps? "The ship is doing fine I guess. Except for having that HK-47 on it."

Revan laughed. "No one's disassembled him yet?"

"Not for lack of trying," the Exile replied wryly.

"At least you don't have any gizka."

They drew nearer to the ship. Its ramp stood open before them. Anna was beginning to relax. She had expected to have to rescue Revan out of a nest of bad guys, or at least out of an angsty depression, and here they were, laughing at every other line they spoke, under the bright sun. If only most of her missions were that simple! Some of the weight lifted. Some sank further into her inner knot of bad history, muttering about optimism only leading to disappointment.

HK-47, one of the few members of the Exile's party who had not gone off on their own after the cataclysm at Malachor, met them at the top of the ramp, peering suspiciously at the new people with twitchy movements of the faceplate that encased his red eyes. Anna was going to say something consoling to him, forgetting that he probably recognized Revan as his former master, but Bao-Dur gasped.

He held the stone in two pieces in his hands. One turquoise half was ovoid and hollow, like a perfectly cut half of an eggshell. Within the other side, a clawlike mechanism grasped a smaller, red stone just as the socket set into the marble plaque had grasped the turquoise one.

Like an aftershock, like the sound after a seismic charge, the Force exploded into a sense of danger. It seemed that a literal explosion blinded Anna behind her eyes—she heard some people screaming in pain and others calling out names in confusion. The Wookiee roared like an animal. Someone strong grasped Anna by her upper arm and propelled her onto the ramp of the _Ebon Hawk_. She frantically wondered if something had physically exploded and continued up the ramp, eyes and mind tightly shut against the pain, trying to instinctively duck behind a bulkhead and at the same time press herself closer to the solid person behind her.

A noise that may have been the ramp closing was herald to a sudden silence. Then people started to breathe and move again. Anna looked up.


	2. The Princess and the Smuggler

**Chapter II**

**The Empire Strikes Back**

Leia Organa almost screamed as the _Slave I _lifted off. It would fly away through the clouds of Bespin, with Han aboard, and she would not be able to scream in front of Lando as much as she would like to… She would not give the Baron-Administrator the satisfaction of seeing her emotional. Perhaps Chewie would see it. But _first_, she was going to run back to the _Falcon _even if keeping up to Boba Fett's ship on foot was incredibly futile…

She turned, already on the balls of her feet, and heard the screech of metal behind her. She whirled around. R2-D2 screamed, as did Lando.

Another ship had crashed into the _Slave I _and driven it partly back over the platform. It was not a plate-buckling collision, although the other ship must've been moving quickly to be nowhere one moment and in front of Boba Fett's face the next. Metal sides simply screamed against each other, and the _Slave I _spun in place over the landing pad. The other ship was bigger than _Slave I_, a flat model like the _Millennium Falcon, _but not of any design Leia recognized. It slewed sideways and pushed the _Slave _closer to the walls of Cloud City.

Leia barely thought about her next action. Like a predator, she took the advantage she saw. Like a sniper, the trajectory line aligned—she aimed her blaster and shot the locking mechanism on the rearward ramp of the _Slave_, as many times in succession as she could. When the smoke cleared, sparks were pouring from the lock keypad and the ramp was lowering, with the angular figure of Boba Fett descending inside.

**Inside the **_**Ebon **__Hawk_, Revan grasped the copilot's controls desperately in her sweating hands and glanced at the diagnostic screen beside her. The neon blue graphic was intimately familiar, very different from the orange clouds and floating buildings which had suddenly appeared in front of the ship. They would have fallen like a rock, had not Carth somehow made it to the pilot's seat and executed the quickest, most on-the-fly startup sequence in galactic history (or so Gwen imagined). Even more surprising was how quickly she had neatly taken her place beside him.

She said, "We just crushed one of its guns. That's no ship I've ever seen—"

He only responded with a flash of white teeth, and the ship slewed again. Then, "Put down the landing claws."

As Gwen complied, the Exile, Anna, entered the cockpit with a swish of her black cloak. "People out there need help," she said.

"I sense it too," Gwen replied, without looking back at the younger woman. The Force in the back of her mind quietly compelled her to act on that information. Gwen closed her eyes for a moment, but the sudden _thud _of the landing claws and the roar of the engine didn't stop. "Where _are _we?"

"Aahh," the Exile said, making Anna glad of the coherence she _had_, and ran out of the cockpit toward the exit.

**Leia did indeed **think as she pointed her blaster at Boba Fett's masked face. She realized that she was threatening the best bounty hunter in the galaxy, the supposed product of an entire warrior culture, and she definitely realized that she was threatening the person who was stealing away from her the man to whom she had rather recently said "I love you". That last one made the first two seem rather unimportant. "Give him back!" She screamed.

R2-D2, plugged into the wall, beeped and whistled. C-3PO translated— "Princess Leia, Boba Fett is calling for reinforcements from the Empire!"

"Where's your pride?" said Lando as he came to stand beside Leia, blaster also at the ready. She glanced at him.

"Pride is no good to me if I'm dead," grumbled Boba Fett.

"I tried," said Lando, beginning to circle around the bounty hunter. "Now, return Han to us."

Fett sighed, an oddly wavering and metallic sound from inside his helmet. "I have to admit I didn't expect you to bring in another Rebel ship just for this barve,"

Leia was not about to say 'Whoever they are, they aren't Rebels'. But then she almost was, because people—two women with ignited lightsabers —_lightsabers??_--, a Zabrak, and a few others hanging back near their ship which was now crowded onto the round pad with Fett's, came into view and looked threateningly at Fetttoo.

"I won't lose my pay," Fett growled, reaching for something out of a belt pack—out of which a thermal detonator rolled harmlessly to the feet of the lightsaber-wielder in red. Leia glanced at her and received a serious smile in return. She felt a strange sense of empathy, as if this woman with a weapon like Luke's knew Leia's fear of losing Han.

Fett had no reaction to the unspoken threat. "Fine. I'll get the cargo out for you."

The lead Jedi woman said, "And I'll be keeping track of you while you do."

"Huh?" Lando expressed his confusion about this suddenly appearing group who seemed to be on his side.

"Shh," Leia replied. She put on her politician's stony expression as she waited for Fett to come back out of his ship. He did, pulling the hovering slab of carbonite that encased Han behind him.

The Jedi woman gritted her teeth and leapt forward. She gestured with both hands—the carbonite slab slid down the ramp, and Boba Fett flew back into his ship.

Something exploded inside. A puff of smoke rolled out of the ship. Leia found herself smiling. She grasped a corner of the smooth carbonite slab as best she could. The red-clad Jedi broke into her thoughts about avoiding looking at Han's transmuted face.

"You need a ship to get out of here?"

"No. We _have_ one—"

"Can we follow you, please? We're…a bit lost."

"Right…okay." _Whatever. Jedi. Han. Saved us. Han._

Lando was speaking to her further, but Leia turned away, shaking. She searched around the side of the carbonite slab for a release button.

Then she heard Luke's voice in her head. _Help me…Leia…_and she could pinpoint him, somehow, as he went through the worst moment of his young life. "Lando!" She gasped. "It's Luke. He's in trouble." The world reeled around her. Too much was happening…

"Fine," said Lando. Then he took her by the hand—she pulled away, and found Chewie next to her like a furry wall—and moved them and Han off the landing platform. They ran as a staggering group to the pad where the _Falcon _sat, and Lando opened the hatch.

Leia had to remain in the cockpit, looking out at the sky over Chewie's shoulder, to look for Luke, but most of her thoughts remained on Han. The carbonite slab had been placed in the common room. She would not leave him to escape the carbonite freeze on his own…

The sight of Luke hanging from the vane below the city, wracked with pain and emotion if his face were any indication, almost shocked her out of her fugue. Lando's communication with the pilot of the mysterious ship unsettled her too, but that had to be cut off when he opened the _Falcon_'s top hatch and ascended, to brave the whipping winds of Bespin to rescue Luke. Leia ran to his side when they returned. Luke moaned and spoke words meaningless to her—she felt nauseous when she realized that he was minus one hand. She did not want to imagine how his conflict with Vader had gone—or how it had been contrived. At least Luke was not frozen in carbonite too.

She and Lando hooked him in to the ship's appropriate medical systems, but all they could do was stabilize him.

"Vader," he murmured, and Leia had to return to the common room. She knelt beside Han's iron-gray form.

She didn't bother asking Lando whether it was logical to unfreeze him now. The Baron-Administrator had returned to the cockpit. Surely the _Falcon _and the mysterious ship were sweeping out of the atmosphere of Bespin right now. Probably, Imperials were coming after them, if any TIE fighters or Star Destroyers existed in this system. But the _Falcon _could get them out of there, and she was not going to worry about the other ship, even if they had saved her life, and the life lying in metal and winking light before her. She would thank them. But now…

She pressed the button that would awaken Han. The carbonite around Han's eyes and mouth began to glow; Leia's breath caught. Was that _normal_? The light engulfed him, and he was revealed alive, breathing heavily, and—Han.

It almost felt like Leia had forgotten his face, and the overwhelming resemblance of the man before her to her half-remembered love shocked through her. He sat up, eyes blank. "Leia…"

She reached for him, touched his face.

"Leia. What's going on?"

"Luke's been hurt by Vader. We're getting off Bespin. We're going to be fine." Leia explained as she ran her hand though his hair.

Han sighed, and crawled shakily out of the carbonite frame. They quietly embraced on the floor of the _Millenium Falcon_.


	3. The Present and the Past

_A/N: Thank you so much to everybody who reviewed/favorited/alerted. I was frightened that no one would be interested in this weird story!_

_I have a feeling that Mara isn't going to appear here. I always felt that KOTOR had the feel of the OT, while Mara has the feeling of the EU, and the only reason I'd put her in would be as a bit of a joke. So Vader and Boba will be the main bad guys, minus Mara. There is, however, a potential BobaMara vignette in the making…muahaha…_

**III**

Two saucer-shaped starships hung beneath the airlocks of the medical frigate _Redemption. _After Luke was stabilized, tranquilized and given over to the droids and doctors, the crewmembers of the _Millennium Falcon _and of the _Ebon Hawk _met in front of one of the wide windows.

Leia stood at Han's shoulder, but knew that he would not be the first to thank the Jedi women and their traveling companions. He had been quiet on the harrowing flight to the Rebel rendezvous point above the galactic plane, but the few things he had said expressed shakiness. His own morality had become apparent to him, and he was worried about Luke too. Apparently the young Jedi was no more invulnerable than Han—and the addition of the group of full-grown Force-users complicated things. "We're indebted to you," Leia said.

"And we to you," said the dark-haired woman. "I am Gwen Bolwyn. This is my co-pilot, Carth Onasi," She indicated the brown-haired man beside her, then the young Twi'lek and the Wookiee. "Mission Vao, and Zaalbar. Then Jedi Master Anna Sacul." She touched the blonde human's arm.

Anna stepped aside from her companions as Mission waved happily. "Hey there." Chewbacca and Zaalbar growled at each other in Wookiee.

Anna introduced the thin human as Mical and the Zabrak cyborg as Bao-Dur. Both were her apprentices. "Oh, and HK-47."

"Greeting: I see that you are not yet dead, despite the urgency in your mannerisms and that fact that this is a military vessel," said the tall droid.

At that moment C-3PO trundled around a corner. He had been thoroughly repaired after being taken apart by Ugnaughts and spending most of his time on Bespin in pieces slung over Chewbacca's back. Chewie had shut him down on the _Falcon _to stop his complaints as the final repairs were taking place. Threepio tilted his head at the newcomers. "Greetings. I am C-3PO, human-cyborg relations."

"Mockery: Greetings, I am HK-47, human-blaster relations."

Everyone looked between the two droids. Then Gwen and Mission chuckled. Han's lips quirked in a smile.

"I'm Captain Han Solo," he said. "My friend, Lando Calrissian." He still spoke a bit tersely about Lando, although the circumstances of the Empire's double cross had been explained to him and he was thankful to still be alive. "This is Princess Leia." He placed a hand on her back for a moment. "The kid…" He seemed to try for a witty description, but could not find one that would not come out caustic and settled for waving toward the operating room. "…is Luke Skywalker."

"It's excellent to meet you," said Mical. He reminded Leia of Luke a bit, with his thick, sandy hair and almost childlike expression, although Mical looked older and the shape of his face was thinner, more pointed."If you don't mind me asking, where are we?"

All of them had passed through the Rebel security checks to get here, and the name Alliance was not missing from those communications and scans. They should know what side of the battlefront they were on now, and seemed comfortable with that. She bit back her first reply detailing the name of the ship and the fleet, but did not know what else to say.

"Odd ship," said Bao-Dur. "It seems old…or strangely made."

Anna, the black-cloaked Jedi, said, "We didn't get to where we met you by a conventional method. We didn't _mean _to show up to help you, though of course I was willing to. This jewel device," She looked at Bao-Dur. "Can I see it?" He took a small blue-green ovoid from one of the pockets of his vest. Anna took it and turned it over in her hands. "It changed our location."

Gwen quietly asked, "What year is it?"

Han replied, "It's been 22 years of grand Imperial rule."

"It's 21000 Republic years for us," said Gwen.

Leia got the faraway, slightly irritated look of doing math in her head. "You date from the formation of the Republic, right? Before the Reformation. So that's…That was…four thousand years ago.

"I think we should sit down."

They moved to an alcove filled with soft, curve-backed couches. Leia pressed a button for a droid to attend them with hot drinks. Gwen and Mical started speaking at the same time but Mical stopped quickly when her voice and his jarred together. Gwen looked deathly serious. "There are stories of Force powers, mostly dark, that could move people through time. That power was very rare, very feared…but I studied it when I was the dark lord."

Leia stammered, "You were a…"

"Dark lord. Lady, if you prefer. During the Mandalorian Wars. Four thousand years ago."

"Four thousand years ago," Leia whispered with her, incredulous.

Gwen looked down at her lap, lips tightly pursed.

"I know there's a lotta weird stuff out there," said Han. "But that's not gonna make me believe you're from the past."

"I believe her," Leia said. Her training as a diplomat had taught her how to read people's faces and judge the likely times in which they would lie. The crew of the _Ebon Hawk _looked, acted, and checked out like no Imperial she had ever seen. They had their own ship, and no reason to mooch off of the more generous side of the war. And even in the old history books her father Bail had kept carefully hidden most of the time, there hadn't been a real Dark Lord of the Sith except for Darth Vader for…who knew how long. "I believe you, Master Bolwyn. You admitted your former identity to us. I don't think you're hiding anything else. And they saved you, Han! Luke may be able to really confirm it, when he wakes up."

"He is Force-sensitive," Anna stated.

"Yes. He finally found a master this year, but…" _He's lying in a room without a hand right now, and these people don't know who Darth Vader is._

Mission said, "I have a bad feeling about this, but—what exactly has happened since 'our time'?"

Leia wanted to hesitate to explain her world, but she did not. It was too frightening to tell quietly and meekly. "You're on a ship owned by the Rebellion, or the Alliance to Restore the Republic. We're at war with the Galactic Empire. The Empire took over from the Republic, and erased most of the records that say how they did it. We're striking back at them. A few years ago we destroyed a super weapon, but our last few battles have not gone well. Luke is proof of that."

That news saddened most of the people in front of her. HK-47 was the exception. Mission's eyes widened and her lekku drooped. Carth stiffened until Gwen brushed her hand against his arm. "H—how did the Republic fall?"

Lando replied, "The Empire has more—money, machines, flunkies."

"But it wasn't always like that," said Leia. "The Empire gained control of the senate somehow, through genius treachery we don't understand."

"The Jedi didn't step in and stop that?" said Mission.

Mical shook his head and spoke quietly, immediately after her. "They aren't perfect."

"We don't know anything about the Jedi now. It's only been about twenty years, but…no one knows what happened to the entire order."

Gwen's hand was over Carth's, their fingers interlaced, twitching nervously. _They're co-pilots, _Leia thought, but she was not going to dwell on Han's distance now.

Anna asked, "What about the Mandalorians?"

Han said, "As a culture or a military force?"

"Military," she firmly replied.

"They barely exist."

Finally, a gray protocol droid shuffled in with a tray of cups. It politely offered it to each person in turn, but most declined. Mical, Anna, and Leia did not. The droid also reported that Luke's surgery was over, but that he wanted to be left alone until he emerged on his own.

"I can't believe we're history," said Mical, looking at his white sleeves as if expecting them to have accumulated dust.

"If this really is the future," Bao-Dur looked around, as if critiquing the ship. Indeed he looked like a tech specialist, with his equipment harness, attendant floating sphere, and part of his arm made only of bright blue energy, a technology more suited to a vision of the future than of the past. He was so soft-spoken for a big alien, but she saw her own surroundings as decrepit through his eyes. She studied him to avoid looking at the two women in the center of the group. Their different colored eyes were identically empty. Gwen still held Carth's hand, but Leia imagined it to be cold.

"All we worked for…useless," Anna murmured.

"No!" Mission jumped up, surprising Leia, but the teenage Twi'lek was not angry. Rather she took Anna's hands in her own and pulled her up from the couch. "We succeeded! You did. You and Gwen defeated the Sith lords! Even the bucket-heads couldn't stop any of you. Now we're so far in the future, we might not have anything to do with this war, you know? It's a new opportunity!"

Mission's head-tails danced behind her back as Anna stood up. Zaalbar roared something to which Chewbacca responded with quizzical chuffing sounds; the two Wookiees got up and talked together, making enough noise that Han and Leia, Lando, and Gwen and Carth, stood and moved back to where they could stand and hear each other speak.

Mission danced around, holding Anna's hand then moving on to take Gwen's. "Let's explore the future!"

Leia lost track of the others as she, Han, Lando, Mission, Gwen, and Carth wandered down a hallway. She didn't feel that she needed to keep an eye on the trio of Jedi.


	4. The Knight and the Master

_Have no fear, skywalker's trademark awesome action scenes will soon be here. You just have to wait to next chapter. smiles_

**IV**

It was quiet in the open room, but the Force distracted the Exile just as a repetitive sound would. She felt acutely the presence of the person called Luke Skywalker. He had only the power of a Knight, but so much potential that it hummed in the Force like a lightsaber beside her ear. He had darkness too, a cloying, terrifying depression on him that would require years of mental healing.

Anna did not know what had happened to him to leave him hanging from the vane below the city on Bespin. She remembered the name Darth Vader, but had forgone the opportunity to ask exactly who that was and what he or she had to do with the young man. She, like Revan, was hurt by the distance they now seemed to be from their home, their time. In fact, it had surprised her how quickly the cheery Revan had turned into what Anna had expected of her at first, a very serious, world-weary person…acting more like Anna felt, although Mission's optimism had give her a new point of view and showed her how the Twi'lek had aided Revan in the hard years after the destruction of the Sith army's Star Forge.

Anna knew what would help her heal herself—healing another. She was a nexus, but sometimes that worked both ways; she picked up on others' emotions, and matched them. At other times she became a Devaronian's Advocate, the polar opposite of the people around here. That would help Luke Skywalker now. He needed healing, in more ways than one.

She turned to her apprentices. Bao-Dur was taller than her, and Mical was about her height; sometimes she felt childlike around them. But so many times they had stood like this and planned how to take groups of enemies or where to go next, so her voice was very strong.

"If it's alright with Knight Skywalker and the medical droids, we're going to try to go in and heal him."

"Certainly, General."

"Do we know what happened to him, exactly?" Mical asked.

"No…can you feel his despair?"

Mical looked down, concentrating. "I can. It is not just physical, that which plagues him."

"No. That's why…." Anna turned and walked toward the small recovery rooms. She followed the Force presence to a young human who appeared asleep on his cot. His serious face looked deceptively serene with his eyes closed, but the Force fought itself behind those lids. He wore a white tunic and pants, and his hands lay over his stomach. The right hand had a thick metal strip around the wrist which probably monitored his condition.

She glanced at her apprentices. Neither of them had the ability to Force heal another, but their presences would aid her. She held her hands out over Luke, and a soft blue aura appeared around him as Anna channeled Force energy to soothe his stressed and damaged body. She could not directly help him mentally if he was unresponsive, but she hoped that her effort would ingratiate her to him. If he really were the last Jedi…her mind wandered. She knew how it felt, to be the last, and how she had been almost disappointed when the continued existence of Atris and other Masters complicated her life. That had been a selfish opinion, though, and it had dissipated. It was worse to be the last than to have bothersome compatriots. Her friends had helped her inordinately, even if they could not understand the Force by experience.

But Atton…

"You too, hmm?" said Luke Skywalker.

"What?" the Exile looked down at him. He was bleary, as if still working off the effects of painkillers and anesthesia, but was sitting up and looking at her. He was thin but muscular, with wide blue eyes. She thought, _Do you mean you too use the Force, or you too had a friend passively betray you and were never really able to forgive?_

"You're a Jedi!" He said incredulously.

"Yes. If you remember us, we…helped rescue your friends. There are four Jedi among us."

"Where'd you come from?"

"…a long time ago."

Luke sighed and lay back down. "Thank you." He closed his eyes.

Quietly, Anna backed out. The soft glow of doing something _good _seemed to suffuse her, even if Luke's condition was still uncertain. He probably just needed to sleep now…Anna paused just outside the door to his room, listening to Mical and Bao-Dur talking in the larger room.

"This is incredible," Mical was saying. "Even I almost can't believe it…"

"The future," Bao-Dur replied. "The concept of time travel is amazing. But this future…looks old. All is not right here. I fear for…"

"It seems that they've lost a lot of knowledge of the past. This 'Empire…' it is not a healthy system if someone with the title of Darth is affiliated with it."

They quieted, lost in thought and as confused as Anna felt. She emerged from her hiding place and smiled at them. "Hey."

"Hello."

Bao-Dur inclined his head formally, but she could see his small smile. "General."

_How many times have I told him that he doesn't need to call me that…but it is more unique than 'Master'. Which I've never enforced. _"What guarantee do we have that this Sith is the leader of the Empire?"

"That's the way it goes, Master." _Of course Mical likes that title. Probably makes him feel more like a Jedi…and what's wrong with that?_ "An oppressive Empire, plus the one public Sith left…" He balanced his hands, then clasped them together.

Anna nodded. He was right; Sith wanted power. It seemed that their view of power, even Revan's, was to take over the galaxy. Anna had never had that particular desire. Her personal stars and planets and hyperspace coordinates, the people in her life and the choices she had to make, were complicated enough.

She sat down on a couch, not to think, but simply to observe. The smooth metal walls of the future gave her all the information input she wanted. The Rebel soldiers, if that was what they were, were friendly…and Luke Skywalker, whom they trusted, trusted her. She felt content.

The apprentices sat down across from her; she closed her eyes, and then opened them to ask, "Do you need anything?"

They replied with "No," and a shake of the head. The Exile's mind wandered…if she asked Bao-Dur to let her trace her fingers over the tattoos on his face, would he oblige?

She closed her eyes. Such emotions, such looks, had never gone anywhere before, with either man. She knew that Mical's respect for her extended to something that made Atton Rand jealous…and that she had encouraged it sometimes, to turn Atton away after the revelation that he had kept so much of his past identity—torturer of Jedi!—from her. She had been comfortable with Bao-Dur since they first met in the controlled environments of Telos, since his soft voice and concern for the planet surprised her. But now, with her the Jedi Master of both of them, feelings which were any more than professional would be plain irresponsible.

**The worst was **that Luke could not believe it. He could not be sure whether Darth Vader ever told the truth. If the statement that kept ringing in his head, that made him feel like acid were eating into his skin—it would be worse if it were true, but such a potential lie galled him too.

His whole body felt like the artificial hand now—numb, less than the sum of its parts, disturbingly painless. He needed to find Leia, to just stand with her in silence…to feel someone else's warmth.

Was the vague memory of a Force-user standing over him a true one or a delusion?

Luke moved out into the next room, a large space near the skin of the ship with a window looking out onto a beautiful nebula. So close to freefall…

The room was filled with people, many of whom Luke did not recognize and who wore clothes—and weapons!—not affiliated with the Rebellion. There was the blonde Force-user, sitting with two men. So she did exist! Luke stood at the outskirts of the group. Han was talking to Chewbacca and another Wookiee while Leia explained her title of 'princess' to a young Twi'lek, but Leia turned around when she noticed Luke at her shoulder. She shouted his name and embraced him; he returned the hug with enthusiasm.

"You're alright!" She exclaimed.

"For now," he replied seriously. His voice scratched his throat.

He thought that she looked like he must; questioning, eyes wide, waiting for more. But he had no more for her. He clumsily squeezed her hand with his mechanical one. He could barely feel her skin, but knew that that was what he was touching—and that he should be happy.

She turned slightly, looking at the others. "These people…saved Han and I. They say they've come from the past. Wait—there are Jedi with them."

"And the Jedi were wiped out years ago…" A dark-haired woman approached him then, and he offered his left hand for her to shake. "I'm Luke Skywalker."

"Nice to meet you," she said. "Master Gwen Bolwyn."

"You're the Jedi—no, she is." He looked at the other woman, the younger one, although she did look considerably older than him. He sensed no lies among them. Pinpoints of darkness yes, but he could believe that they were from the past. Yoda had told him of strange powers and technologies now long lost. "She helped me. I…thought I was the last Jedi! You'll have to meet…Yoda…" _He never told me…Ben never told me._ "I—" Luke unceremoniously sat down on the couch next to a human wearing brown and white. He hung his head, breathed slowly, tried to forget and remember who he had used to be…

"You've….oh," said Gwen; from her too emanated Force healing like he had never felt, an automatic lightening of his spirit and his body, a cool breeze. Was she going to cry? Did she _know?_

"You read my mind?" He said angrily. No one should know this!

"No," she said firmly. "Your revelation is safe. But I recognize what I see in your eyes. She looked around. "All of us…Jedi aren't perfect. All of us have troubles. We'll have to have a training session, to wipe some of this tragedy away. I mean to say, that I know what it is like to find out something terrible about yourself." She met his eyes.

He began to say, 'it's not about myself'. But partly it was. Was his lineage, his father Vader, the reason Yoda had warned him away from the dark side so adamantly? "It's—that's great." He meant it, and she seemed to understand.

"Her name is Anna Sacul, the one who visited you. She is an accomplished Jedi Master as well, and her apprentices are here."

"All right. Ah…Master Bolwyn…do you recognize my name? Did you know a Jedi called Skywalker?" _Darth Vader betrayed and murdered your father…Obi-Wan was Vader's master. _His breath caught in his throat.

"No, I'm sorry."

"Thank you." He could not say what exactly he felt right now, the emotions were so complicated. Guilt, fear, secrecy, _hate/love_—but he was very relieved when Leia urged everyone to sit down and he was squished on the couch between Master Sacul's human apprentice and the teenage Twi'lek who joyfully introduced herself as Mission Vao.

Said Leia, "We haven't gotten another mission from High Command yet, and honestly with what we've gone through I'll fight getting one. Masters Sacul and Bolwyn, and their friends, came to this time via this device." She held up the turquoise stone. "This originated on Dantooine. Does anyone have any suggestion besides going there?"

The person Luke vaguely recognized as Han's friend Lando, who Luke had first seen beneath Cloud City—_wind rushing, cold—the young Jedi blinked and forced himself out of a flashback—_spoke. "I'm sorry to desert you all at this time, but the Empire took over my entire business venture on Bespin. I've communicated with others, but I need to visit my places to make sure there's no more trouble. I don't think I'll be able to join you on Dantooine."

Leia simply nodded.

It took a few moments of silence to get Luke to speak, his voice low and rough. "Master Yoda may know about that device." He definitely wanted to commune with the other Jedi, but…how much would they know?

"That's true," said Leia.

"This is too much weirdness for me," said Han, his hands behind his back. "but you have my ship, princess." He grinned widely, and she gave him a tight-lipped smile back with sincerity behind it.

"You have ours too," said the man Sacul was sitting next to, a human.

Silence, and they looked at each other, and they wondered what they were about to learn.


	5. Love and Oppression

_Thank you so much to the people who favorited this fic. Reviews make you have to pay less for college tuition! just kidding…This chapter is dedicated to that RevanCarth story that's in my favorites, cause that scene is sorta similar. _

**V**

As Luke followed Leia to the _Falcon_, both crews having agreed to go to Dagobah to ask Master Yoda about the device that enabled the _Ebon Hawk_'s crew to travel forward in time, Luke realized that two of his friends were missing. "Leia. Where's R2?"

As soon as she turned slightly to respond Luke heard Artoo, as if summoned by his name, come beeping and whistling down a nearby hallway, followed by C-3PO yelling and a bronze protocol droid speaking in controlled, menacing tones.

"Correction: Are your aural sensors damaged? I did not state that you should desert your master. Repetition: Suggestion: Must you be so subservient to the meatbags?"

"HK-47!" snapped Anna and Gwen from the middle of the line.

HK-47 walked slowly toward the group and away from the flustered Threepio. He was a tall, sleek droid Luke did not recognize by body or model number, with square, red photoreceptors and an expressive, sarcastic synthesized voice. "Yes, masters?"

"Stop antagonizing that droid," said Gwen dismissively.

"Yes, master."

Luke stifled a laugh as Threepio and Artoo trundled up beside him. "It's so good to see you sir," said Threepio, while his small counterpart made sounds to the same effect.

"You too," Luke replied. "Artoo…I've lost the X-Wing. It must've been left on Bespin."

Artoo's low _whoo _sound did not quite express the disappointment Luke felt at the abandonment of his beloved starship. So far was he now from the heroic days, from Yavin IV, from celebrations and ignorance…He almost feared seeing his master again and asking what terrible mistake had been made, what rip in the fabric of destiny had allowed Vader to lie…or Yoda and Ben to.

The musty starship-smell emanating from the _Falcon_'s top hatch comforted him with its familiarity. The two crews began to move apart, but Leia spoke loudly to Luke and Anna paused. "Do you want to go with the Jedi?"

He took his time meeting Leia's eyes, then Anna's, then Mission's because she happened to be the next farthest away. "I'll spend time with you," he said, meaning the Force-users. "Not right now, okay?"

Leia laid a hand on his arm and nodded. Just before he turned to descend into the ship she said, "What's wrong, Luke? It's not just that you lost the battle, is it?"

"No. It's that he allowed me to survive. But I don't want to talk about it now—okay?"

She nodded, her smooth, oval face beautiful and stern. He took his time lowering himself into the _Falcon_.

**Gwen and **Chewbacca synchronized the ship's navicomputers and entered the hyperspace coordinates for Dagobah. The woman was left resting for a moment as Carth and Han guided the ships away from the _Redemption_. She idly stared at the galactic map before her, at the x, y, and z axis with their numbers blurring together. It was certainly not easy to translate between a modern navigational computer and one from four thousand years in the future. Luckily they had been able to do it manually, not electronically—names of planets had not changed.

It would take a little over two weeks to get to Dagobah, the home of the last remaining Jedi Master.

After she and Carth sent the ship into hyperspace on the _Millennium Falcon_'s tail, she excused herself from the cockpit. She roamed the ship, running happy memories or exciting ones over and over in her mind, noting who from her original crew had resumed their accustomed places. HK-47 again took to the alcove in the common room and stood there as if guarding a room full of treasure. Zaalbar casually worked with the table-sized computer in the center of the room. Gwen exchanged some words with Mission, who was unpacking sheets from the locker in the girls' dormitory and making the bed above the one which had been hers, where Anna now slept. Gwen noticed that her own bed was empty. The other lower bunk had been Bastila's…some of Anna's personal items, a backpack and a datapad, were scattered about it now.

The Jedi Exile and her apprentices had taken over the swoop hanger. A bike still sat in the corner of the room opposite the workbench, but it looked unused, leaning over on its side and with a dull coat of red paint. _Canderous…_the Exile took Bao-Dur and Mical through flowing lightsaber katas, their eyes closed, blades humming. The Zabrak's was orange, Mical's blue, and the Exile's blue, with the long handle that indicated it was a double-bladed weapon even though only one side was activated. Gwen ran her hands over her own green and purple blades, feeling the currents of the peaceful Force flow after the three moving in synch in the middle of the floor. She could move with them if she wanted too, even though she did not know the exact routine they were doing, but the cold steel of the 'saber at her left hip urged her to move on to other matters.

She had taken the shoto, a half-length blade, from the body of a dark Jedi on Korriban. It was a powerful weapon, rigged with two potent crystals—but the mission it reminded her of almost sent tears burning up into her eyes.

The woman once called Darth Revan re-entered the cockpit and stood in the door, looking at Carth. He was not what she would picture when she pictured 'handsome'. But the memories of him piloting, fighting, walking, flooded over her and it was his voice that drew her, his loyalty and their conversations, their arguments…He spoke without turning around.

"What's on your mind?"

The thought of what was on her mind almost made the tears strike Gwen again; instead she moved forward, staring at the center console. "I'm sorry."

"Sorry for what."

She struggled the words out, rejected them from the guilty core of herself which she had, during the year when she had not heard his voice every day, almost forgotten. "For your son! For Dustil." When he never replied she kept speaking, clutching the edge of the console. "I never saved him! I never resolved…anything…" _Anything between us. The reason that I'm so willing to touch your hands, your shoulder, to watch you--_

He leaned back in his seat; she heard it move. "I know."

She had to know what he looked like. Were his eyes closed? With the Force telling her that everything was fine, she had to look at his mundane expression of sadness and softness. She turned and their eyes met—brown and brown. She remembered the blue tint of the hologram the first time she had seen his face. "Carth, when I—"

"I forgave you, for being the Dark Lord of the Sith. Forgiving you for not completing one person's family, when you brought Bastila and Mission to their conclusions, whatever they were…this should be harder. It's more personal." Their eyes locked. "But it's not."

She sensed it, like he couldn't, like she could smell him—

"I wanted to put a blaster to Revan's head once." And he reached up to touch her cheek, to draw her closer to him, and she thought he looked incredible with his lips parted, eyes narrowed, between longing and confusion.

**Anna had thought** that the kata would relax her and her companions. The oft-repeated, dance-like movements coordinated the Jedi team, but this time, the former Exile kept glancing at her protégés, correcting them—Mical's strikes were needlessly wide, Bao-Dur's stance incorrect—but she did not want to speak and break the rhythm. Therefore in the Force a cloud of dissatisfaction pervaded the room, and after the first few katas she called a halt to them. She sat down near the workbench and caught her breath.

"Good job. Well…we just went through that so that I'd feel better about being…here. Now. Yeah." _I feel like a teenager…_

"That is understandable, General," said Bao-Dur.

The Zabrak's back was to her, but Mical took a few steps toward her, his eyes distant. "But this place…" He spread his arms, upturned, empty palms indicating the entire galaxy turning around them. "All my life I've wanted to study history. And now that my life _is _history, I don't feel disheartened. I feel the magic of someone digging through rocks or data files and finding records of _me_…and wondering what I was like. I'll die for that person. I feel that is an even more admirable goal for a Jedi, because people look up to us, no matter our actual qualities and skill. History is the role model for the present."

**The feeling of **Carth's hand remained on Gwen's cheek, nothing more, and she touched the line of his jaw as they stared at one another. She would not mind if this anticipation, this oft-desired prologue, lasted forever with the same feeling of success and amazement, but he would…"I'm sorry," she breathed. "I've been sorry for the last thousand years…" She tried to caress his thoughts as his fingers made tiny, shaky movements across her skin, but he couldn't give that back, couldn't…

Then he smiled with one side of his mouth. "I know. I've been sorry too. And I couldn't trust anyone to take that away from me." The pauses between his words, the staccato tone she remembered so well that could be commanding as well as vulnerable, captivated her. But he was talking about his _family_, his first love, the shadow over him, and she did not know what to say. "But you gave me a chance to love you once. I've thought about it ever since you left…going somewhere I could not understand."

She replied truthfully. "I did not find anything. Except…how much I wanted to be back, in a stylized version of my life with everyone I met on the way to the Star Forge. Everyone, even stupid HK-47…"

"Even the Selkath?"

"Sorta…"

"You'd willingly put up with that again?" Carth laughed softly. "That's brave. It's either beautiful or foolish…"

She smiled too and moved closer to him, touched the fabric of his shirt just as she'd wanted to, forgot any future thoughts as--

The ship shook. Gwen straightened up and stepped backwards, staring now at the absence of hyperspace lines in front of her. The comm crackled and Han Solo's voice emerged. "—seven hells! Get us out of their range, Chewie!"

Gewn flung herself into the co-pilot's seat and flicked on the comm. She bit back a curse when she had to change the automatic frequency to the one the _Falcon _used. She shouted at Han, "What's going on!"

"We're under attack," Carth shouted dispassionately through the _Hawk_'s internal comm. As the ship turned, Gwen saw two enormous, pyramidal battleships floating in front of them.

"They're Imperial interdictors," said Han. "We've gotta get outta range of their gravity or we can't jump to hyperspace—what, Chewie? Blast it! TIE fighters at eighteen-hundred."

When Gwen called up her own tactical display it was swarming with one-man ships the computer could not identify. In a rush she sensed Anna take one gun and one of the Jedi apprentices take the other. Carth pointed the _Hawk_'s nose "down" and shoved the joysticks forward. Gwen tracked the _Falcon_'s progress on her screen as it looped around the squadron of ships on its tail. A similar formation followed the _Hawk_. She shouted into the comm, "Any tips on how to kill those things quick?"

"Shoot them—they don't have any shields. But do it fast."

The Imperial behemoths slid to the top of the viewport and around its sides as Carth flipped the _Hawk_. Lasers pierced the blackness of space and tore apart two of the enemies. Gwen gritted her teeth as she raised mental shields against the pilots' screams. She hoped Anna's apprentices would handle it.

A cloud of Imperials swept onto the same plane as the _Hawk_ and began to approach it from above. The few lasers sent their way from the top turret missed wide as the square-winged ships dodged away. The _Falcon _literally flew circles around the ones on its tail, cutting their pieces by half as the song of the Force expressed triumph from Luke and Leia at the guns. Then the maw of the battleships opened again and more fighters poured out.

Gwen clenched her teeth. She watched the _Falcon _on the tactical grid as it dipped behind one of the battleships, enemies hemming it in on the side away from the Imperial craft. Admirably the lasers pumped out of the _Hawk _and TIE fighters exploded into fire all around her, dripping gouts of flame and ripped metal spars that floated into infinite space, but the Imperials were overwhelming them, like scavengers on something half-alive. Gwen shouted into the intercom on Carth's side of the cockpit, "Anybody know Battle Meditation?"

"Yes."

It was Carth's voice. And in the next moment the discordant mental notes of the battle solidified, synchronized into a perfect chord—the _Falcon _zoomed in front of the viewport upside down, so close to the _Hawk _and the battleship that its sensor array dish, torn off of the side of the battleship, careened against the _Hawk_'s nose and rained sparks outside the viewport. Its remora-school of starfighters followed, and as they streamed across the _Hawk_'s front, Carth, Gwen, and the apprentice unleashed their firepower. The viewport was obscured by smoke and purple flashes from the stressed shields, but in a moment they were through the cloud of destruction and the _Falcon _flipped belly-up to turn without any leeway and deliver the same treatment to the Imperials behind the _Hawk. _Han whooped. Carth shouted co-ordinates to him, and the two ships sped away from the Imperials side-by-side.

"We've gotta jump out of here," said Gwen.

"To where?" Carth muttered.

"Point seven three," said Han.

"What?"

"Come around. I'll transmit my computer numbers to yours just before we jump, that way they can't track you. You're slower, no offence,"

"Will it translate?" Gwen snapped.

"It better. Now!"

Carth pulled the lever. The stars became a kaleidoscopic tunnel in front of the ship. Gwen pressed herself against the back of her seat, shivering inside. "We just jumped blind!"

"It's alright. I was looking at the map earlier—he's put us on a major route. We're not going exactly where we were, but they won't look for us in the obvious place first. That's the theory anyway."

She took a breath. "Okay. Nice work."

He busied himself with the controls again, hands hovering quizzically over the console. He flicked a switch and stood up. He walked around the cockpit, close to the central console.

She thought of something to say, but didn't bother. He leaned over her shoulder and kissed her without prelude, as if simply continuing the conversation they had had before.


	6. Sin and Redemption

**VI**

The journey continued, slightly off-course and definitely delayed. Han insisted that they stay on the major hyperlane until their trail grew cold to the Imperials who had attacked the two ships as soon as they recognized the _Falcon_. However, for a time it was very peaceful on the _Ebon Hawk_. Life went on. Zaalbar often noticed Carth come to the dormitory to sleep very late. Anna noticed the same of Revan. Mission returned to a holo-game which had been her particular form of entertainment when Revan owned the _Hawk_, and often could her cries of joy or frustration be heard from the common room as she blasted imaginary enemies or solved complicated puzzles.

She was playing that game as Anna passed by on her way to the swoop hanger. That room had become the unofficial meeting place for regular training sessions for the Jedi or whoever else wanted to join in. She thought it very interesting that Revan made it explicitly clear that Carth, Mission, and Zaalbar, the non-Force-sensitive members of the party, needed to go into practice bouts with the Force-users to challenge themselves and be as ready as they could for any opponent. With the amount of Sith Lords and minions she had found herself facing over the years, Anna could not afford to disagree.

Mical and Bao-Dur were working lightsaber moves when she entered the hanger. She interrupted them with, "We're going to spar now, guys. Bao first."

They immediately began to circle. Anna took her lightsaber from her belt but did not activate it; the metal was cold in her hands. He held his blade low; she snapped hers on.

She feinted to his shoulder and stepped aside when he responded with a stab. Bao-Dur executed a few impressive-looking but too-wide blocks and Anna drew him back to his center line with her next attacks. She swept her blue blade up and tapped the terminal curve against his stomach. He darted backwards, surprisingly angry.

She retracted her blade and stepped away, but kept eye contact. He knew that, in the real world, the tap would have been a killing strike. He was not as adaptable as Mical or as she would like him to be; it frustrated her to have to adapt her fluid fighting style to one fit for his more compact body type.

She gestured Mical forward. He jogged a few steps away from the wall, then extended one hand as if to Force push—then jumped off the ground, rotating around his hand in the air, coming down on his toes with bent knees and his green lightsaber lit in his hand striking up from an angle Anna had not expected. She grinned and eased into the Force, feeling him move within it almost as naturally as she did. They too circled.

He slashed down at her and she blocked; he was going to Force push so she did first, and as their palms almost touched his lightsaber flew out of his palm. He danced backwards and sideways. She wasn't going to relinquish her own lightsaber if he did not figure out how to get his back; this would be interesting. Force push and its more powerful equivalents were the Exile's favorite powers, so of course the apprentice had picked them up—but Force pull not so much.

Lazily the Exile brought her thrumming blade across toward Mical's head. He ducked under it and suddenly his hands were around hers then pushing on her shoulder, and her center of gravity was collapsing backwards from his ankle behind hers. As it was a practice, he let her fall slowly, so it was easy for her to reverse the hold and bring him down beside her. He crouched for a moment, palms smacking against the pockmarked floor beside her. He reached for her throat, his white shirt filling up her vision.

Later she would think that instinct had made the next move for her, but in the moment it was more of a spike of emotion, a fear that she'd either stop fighting or—do what she did next, which was to pivot a bit and not so much kick Mical in the stomach as violently push him away with her feet. Unfortunately it must have been a strong push; he gasped and sat down, blue eyes squeezing shut.

Anna stood up and went to him, as did Bao-Dur.

"I'm alright," said Mical, but a dark feeling sank into Anna's thoughts. Guilt…in no way should she have hit him so hard. It was not needed…but she had been frightened by something.

Perhaps by how impressed by him she was.

"I'm sorry, Mical, " she said as the historian stood up, one arm across his stomach. "I'll heal you,"

"Please."

She touched his arm and took the Force to assuage his pain, creating a soft blue glow around them. "I'm sorry." She stared into his eyes, matching their sadness, hoping he understood.

"It's fine." He patted her on the back, and walked away, belatedly retrieving his lightsaber from under the swoop bike and glancing at her before leaving the room.

She dropped her eyes from Bao-Dur's gaze._ I'm the Master. I ought to have more responsibility and not overreact like that. _She shakily looked at Mical before he disappeared around the corner. _This…am I far too used to violence? What just happened exactly? _She sighed. "No more training for now, I guess."

"If you say so, General. Although I should work on my fighting with the lightsaber more in the future."

"We will!" She regretted speaking as snappishly as she did as soon as he exited the room and Revan passed him on the way in. She looked at Anna, and the Exile felt like an apprentice in her sight. Anna sat down against an uncomfortable bulwark and waited for Revan to say something.

"You are faring well?" The older woman asked casually.

The Force told Anna of Revan's even temper and understanding nature, as well as her wealth of worldly knowledge and painful experiences. She radiated trustworthiness. It seemed that they had known each other for years, not weeks. Anna replied truthfully. "No."

Revan sat down next to her, sharp face tipped in an inquiring expression.

Anna battened down her emotions and spilled them to Revan. "I feel like I'm a teenager again, not sure what to think or whether I should think it. I…Jedi aren't supposed to love, Master Bolwyn. But I want to. It's created so much…awkwardness between Mical and Bao-Dur, and I'm not a good teacher because of it. I—they're older than I am, but I'm trying to relate to them like to children, but I can't—And you broke the Code." She looked at Revan with accusation masking her disappointment and confusion.

"You're a decent teacher," Revan began. "You've brought them far, you alone."

"Thank you. But…love means forgoing the Jedi way! How can I be a good teacher when I feel this conflict?"

"Let me tell you some of my story. It might help. The Council probably knew my feelings toward Carth, even in the very beginning when I did not know my own Force sensitivity. But…if love was my only vestigial sin, it would be overlooked."

Anna smiled, but stopped half way when she remembered that they were talking about Revan's—Gwen's—"sins" as Darth Revan. "Oh. Sorry?"

"It's okay."

"Can we…do you…really talk about it?"

"I can't choose not to remember what I've done. I'm fine with talking about it now to someone I trust with it. What do you want to know?"

Questions Anna had wanted to ask but never imagined getting answers to queued up eagerly in her mind, but she kept them from coming out too enthusiastically. "Carth told me that your memory was erased for a while. What was that like?"

"At first I had no idea, of course. Afterward…I remembered screaming as Bastila held on to me. She became my Master, or watchdog, then friend. But she dumped recently mind-wiped me into the service of the Republic, with nothing by my real name, the clothes in my footlocker, and false memories up to and including the moment I decided to join the military. I remember having a reason to subjugate the galaxy, and planting the Star Maps, and researching ancient ruins. Anything else you'd like to ask?"

"Just…how did you _recover_? From learning who you were…from battling your apprentice?"

"I don't have fond memories of Malak," Gwen said with some barb in her voice. "It was the guilt that bothered me the most. I was responsible, almost completely, for the evil he eventually did. The Star Forge symbolized my big, war-producing mistake. Mission helped me recover. Even after her own life didn't go right, she could find happiness in the next event, could laugh at it. We've still got life after all this, she says. She felt terrible about the razing of Taris, the first planet she lived on for any length of time, then she got up and moved on, helping my mission after a period of mourning. Smile about your problems when you can. You'll feel better then. That's true for humans or Twi'leks. I'm not sure about Zabraks."

Anna laughed shortly, stiffly.

Gwen's voice grew soft. "Honestly, I can't help you with the decision you want to have to make about love."

_Do I want to have to make it? Almost. I want them to make me choose._

"What I shouldn't say, but will, is that there is no Jedi Council here. Young Skywalker isn't going to reprimand us. But personally…I didn't make a decision to love Carth. It just happened, whether we were in front of the Council or light-years away. And I thank the Force that he loves me too. There was nothing of the Jedi code or ethics about a decision like that. I mean, I wouldn't stay with him if he were a murderer or something, but…"

She knew what she had said. Anna just added her immediate thought. "We're murderers," she said.

Pause. "You're right. Of Sith soldiers, of animals, or Mandalorians or mercenaries…"

"You're Darth Revan."

"Of Jedi. We're all murderers here. A big happy family…I wonder how many Skywalker's sent on the Big Jump." She laughed sardonically, painfully. "But this sounds like a conversation people would only have if they were drunk. We're good enough to deal with it sober."

_Atton. I never forgave you. Not for torturing Jedi…not for ogling me the first day we met._ "Sorta deal with it anyway. How'd we _get _to this conversation?"

"I don't know.", she laughed.

Anna did not want to continue. Her save-the-galaxy mission had made killing bad guys a job, just like Atton's tortures had been his. She could say hers were for a good cause, but had the feeling that that logic could be turned around. By Revan, right next to her. But guilt didn't dig into her so much when Revan reached out and they hugged for forgiveness and for understanding.

"That didn't really answer your question," said Revan.

"At all." She laughed; Revan joined in. "It almost puts stuff in perspective though."

"Good. I can come up with real advice if you've like. Keep your personal relationships separate from those dictated by the Jedi Order. Your apprentices are responsible adults, but if you have feelings for one of them, or them you…don't encourage or discourage it. Let it take its course. What will happen will feel natural to you, if not to the person who feels left out. Is that advice sound?"

"Mostly. But…" _What if I love both of them?_ "I'm teaching them, among other things, to mean other people's minds here! We're bound to pick up on something, or…"

"Read, not assimilate. That's part of the difference between the sides. It's not my forte, but we should have a mediation session."

"Okay."

Revan stood up. "I suggest you look at the HoloNet some, figure out what's happened in this time and what the Empire makes our new allies out to be. And who this Vader is."

**Late at night **Revan sat with Carth on a couch in the common room and thought about such abstract concepts as love, redemption, and responsibility. Blue light from the silenced HoloNet program flashed across his serene face. She brushed the omnipresent strands of hair across his forehead. "Do you think that love solves all the problems the fairy tales say it does? Don't laugh. Like it says in stories."

"I know an awful lot of problems it can't solve. One doomed couple won't always cause a feud to end. Romantic love won't stop jealousy, or a bullet, or the pain when the one you love is with another, or death."

"But…it's not like other emotions," she said. "You fall into it."

He nodded. "It can't stop lots of things. But does stop loneliness, which encompasses a lot of problems."

"Bastila was immature to be a Master too," Gwen said idly. "It surprised me when I realized that."

"You've been talking to Anna?" Carth asked.

"Yeah."

"She's a good kid."

Gwen nodded. "And everything turned out alright for us and Bastila."

"Gwen…I don't want you to break the Jedi Code for me." He looked sad and as far away as she felt.

She laid a hand against his chest, falsely accusing. "Don't you dare be that noble, Carth. Don't say that for the good of me. I love you, Carth, and that makes the Code disappear—I know the dark side, and this isn't it!"

He turned to face her. Rare tears welled up in her eyes. She felt an upwelling of loss, even though they had only been reunited for a short time. The parables always told of lovers turning to the dark side to save their loved one, because that was the only option, turn or leave the other to die, and then sinking, for whatever reason, into despair and darkness.

Even without Force sensitivity, Carth almost followed the same train of thought. "Don't sacrifice anything for me. I'm a soldier. I'm used to being prepared for death. And _noble _death isn't a chance effect, it's the eventual end to a noble, valiant life. But…you're my weakness. I want to _live _for you now. And…is that _right_?"

"It _feels _right. You're my weakness too. Remember, the Council never said anything about love, and I felt it then.

"Even if you do blather sometimes."

"What? I've been making perfect sense. Haven't I?"

"The part about nobility kinda came out of nowhere."

"Sorry." He pulled away from the rather confrontational stare which had developed between them, but chuckled.

"Trust me." She said. His expression remained soft, his Force sense kind. "I know the Jedi ways well when I'm dealing with my emotions in battle. Then, I'm a Jedi Master. But other times…other motivations can guide me." She leaned forward to kiss him, like she had wanted to so many times, and he did not stop her.

**Uncertainty sank into **Luke's thoughts like a stone. He carried it with him as he slept and awoke, as he spoke, and especially if he avoided speaking.

In his vindictive moments, he hoped that Vader had only said it to enrage and unnerve him, whereas now the Jedi was too far away for the results of the plot to be felt. But if it were truth…

It had gone the opposite way from what Darth Vader had planned. Instead of attacking with the Force—the only resource he had once Vader had ridden him of sword and sword-hand—or become curious enough to surrender quietly. The revelation had not caused Luke to become emotionally vulnerable, not after the initial, intense hours. Instead, his emotions had been overwhelmed. Numbed. Quieted. Scabbed over.

He played dejarik or whatever else the holo-chess board had to offer, to keep his mind off the nothingness. The second battle, when it came, relieved him of boredom and his over-analysis of the vision he'd seen in the cave on Dagobah.

"What—" yelled Han as the alarm telling that the _Falcon _had dropped out of hyperspace beeped in the common room. The crew took to their battle stations. Luke saw the clear, black ether as he dashed past the cockpit. He climbed into the upper gun turret, opening his mind to his surroundings as he flicked the comm and the targeting computer on.

Han said, "We're in the same system as Kashyyyk. There's two Star Destroyers out there. _Ebon Hawk_, keep close an' quiet. No matter what I say."

The two ships cruised between the Star Destroyers closing like fangs around them.


	7. Fight and Fall

_LukeMission? I honestly never thought of that…lol Perhaps I'll give them a heart-to-heart chat just for you._

**VII**

Luke in the turret with the gun powered down, listening to Han lie his way out from between two Star Destroyers. Chewie must be in a flurry of uploading fake transponder codes. The Force better be with us, Luke thought, or the _Falcon _better be completely unrecognizable without the sensor array. Surely there were too many ships in existence for all of the Imps to know even the _Falcon _by sight…

"Come in, unidentified YT-1300 and unidentified craft. What's your business here?"

Han's voice sounded rough and accented. "We're returning some Wookiee slaves to a base on Kashyyyk."

"Transmit your clearance codes now please."

"We haven't got time," Han sounded sincerely distressed and sorry. "These things are—"

Chewie roared.

"Don't lose anything," the Imperial said, rather frightened-sounding. "Go on through!"

"Thanks,"

Luke breathed easier as the ships limped toward green Kashyyyk. Chewbacca guided them to a town where, he hoped, the Empire did not have a significantly dangerous presence. The trees, thicker than the starship was wide, stretched up and down around them. Round, wooden houses sat in clusters, linked by walkways with wooden slats and carved railings. Chewie urged the two crews off their ships and the landing pads, which were the trunks of broken trees. They eased into the crowd. Wookiees walked freely in the village, but Imperial stormtroopers did too, as did people who were not immediately able to be labeled, but who looked varied and rough. Luke sensed tension and fear from many beings. He kept his head bowed beneath his brown hood and one hand on his blaster, missing the lightsaber he had worked so hard to learn before he lost it. He wanted to look in wonder at the trees, but did not.

With Zaalbar and Chewie in the middle of the disreputable-looking group, Han lead the way through the village. Luke did not know what the plan for the group was, and he regretted leaving the ships even if Chewie's relatives or contacts lived somewhere around here.

A trio of stormtroopers intercepted them half-way through the main part of the village. Their masks swept stares like searchlights over the group. Luke edged forward, wanting to be able to serve as Obi-Wan had even though there were other Jedi with them. (He would have to ask about training soon, have to know who he was compared to them, but connections in the Force meant too much right now--)

"Where are all of you going?" said the troops' commander.

There was a jostling and blurting out of words as Han, Chewie, Luke, and Master Bolwyn started to speak. Han filled in the quick silence afterward. "Transporting dangerous Wookiees, sir." Luke knew without Jedi powers that Han was hoping this ruse would work again.

The troopers were peering under Luke's and Leia's hoods. Luke transferred some of the fuzziness in his mind to theirs, getting a glimpse of their thoughts. They hungered for high profile Rebels to convict, but did not expect to find any here. _We're just the usual riffraff, that's right. Move along._

"We issued you an ID," the trooper told Han. "Let's see it."

"Ah…"

The trooper raised his rifle. Chewie surged forward, roaring, before Luke could speak, and knocked the gun out of the Imperial's hand. "It's loose!" Han yelled, and Zaalbar swung the second trooper by the arm into the third. Han and Chewie broke into a run, and Luke and Leia followed. Over screams and bird's calls he heard Master Bolwyn telling the other Jedi to run too.

**Revan saw Mission **scream, "You Hutt-slime!" and unsheathe her vibroblade. Then Zaalbar, of all people, caught her up and urged her along. They and Carth lead the way after Han up a narrow walkway. "Come on!"

Anna, Bao-Dur, and Mical lagged behind, ready to fight, and Revan understood their hatred for this Galactic Empire which was not unlike the Sith military of their own time, but from what Luke had implied, drawing lightsabers now was _not _a good idea—when Anna and the others got caught up in the momentum of the group, much to Revan's relief, more white-armored soldiers started emerging and aiming their weapons.

HK-47 asked Revan, "Would you like me to aerate any of their heads for you, master?"

"Maybe—"

The Force warned twice, and Revan could not prioritize lives. To her left, a storm of blasterfire screamed toward Anna. To her right, Mission had darted out to attack the Imperials while they were preoccupied. Following her frightened gaze, HK-47 stepped forward and fired—but they weren't going to make it. The Rebels needed to disappear, fast, and—someone tumbled over the railing in an explosion of sound and pain. Mical—

An ion bolt and a blue ring impacted HK-47 and Mission respectively. They collapsed, and Han's crew was already standing on a lift farther up the street, anxious to descend. Zaalbar and Anna screamed. Revan herded them, pushing the remaining party members toward the lift, leaving Mission and HK-47 behind because both troopers and civilians had surrounded them, surely they'd be questioned instead of outright killed, they could fend for themselves, she'd come back and rescue them, they Rebels must be hidden or revealed—

Anna and Bao-Dur were clutching the rail of the lift as it fell into dappled, green dimness; wide-eyed they cast about with all their senses. Revan had no sense of him at all, none of his life or death.

"We'll find them," she called to Zaalbar. "We'll rescue her."

The _Falcon _crew took stock of who was missing. Han said, "Couldn't you full-grown Jedi take out the whole garrison?"

Carth replied, snappish, in their defense. "If you want the rest of the garrisons to converge on us too, they'll go on in with lightsabers and Force blazing. Where are we going?"

Han looked to Chewie. He translated, "A hidden place Chewie kept on this world in case."

Leia said, "It's fine to lie low, but we need to get back to the ships soon."

"I know," said Han. "But it won't be easy."

The lift descended in silence, except for Anna's footsteps as she paced, her thoughts whirling with worry. Were the Force audible, there would have been a clamor. Anna and Bao-Dur hurt and reached out, trying to failing to sense Mical or even be sure of his fate. Zaalbar mourned and repressed anger. Luke was confused and tired, and not just from today. But certainly they had not planned on getting separated, or not knowing whether one of their number was alive or dead.

The lift stopped at a narrow, flat branch-path and wound around the tree's trunk, across a hanging thoroughfare, and down a ladder. Around a curve and down some stairs sat a small house against the trunk of a wroshyr tree. Through the Wookiee-sized door there was a dark living room with benches set against the wall covered in woven blankets. It was cool inside, lacking the heat-amplifying humidity outside. Chewbacca huffed and growled to himself as he secreted the key somewhere on his bandolier. The others sat down and looked at each other, breathing gently. The Empire would track them soon. They needed to get off the planet and back on course.

**Boba Fett placed **the last of his armor, the left gauntlet, over his bruised forearm. He ached still, from the surprise beating Darth Vader had given him after Fett returned to Imperial-held Bespin without Skywalker or Solo and with the news of a handful of Jedi for the taking. Vader had viciously broken the laws of physics if not decency to throw Fett across the room as soon as his failure was revealed. The armor shell clattered, pinched, and bruised Boba Fett's skin; one angular, masked face glared up at another, and Fett decided that Darth Vader was insane. Yes he put credits Fett needed—for food, for equipment—in the bounty hunter's pocket. He was also as used to expressing his emotions by whatever violence he desired as Jedi were used to self-righteousness.

Fett thought that Jedi meant heartless, and that his own place as a bounty hunter in the galactic underworld meant a warm ship and a familiar bed to sleep in, with his trophies—weapons, locks of hair, trinkets—safely around him.

It also meant, right now, that he had to go join Darth Vader again, now on the bridge of a Star Destroyer. Perhaps the dark lord thought to intimidate Fett, but the Mandalorian marched between the crewmen who had called him scum and stood beside the second most powerful man in the galaxy, matching his impunity. Emerald Kashyyyk floated before them.

Vader said, "This is your chance to redeem yourself, Fett. I want the Jedi and the Rebels. If you must split them up or slay them, leave Skywalker for me."

As always, he sounded malevolent. Boba Fett had no reason to think that Luke Skywalker was anything besides a Rebel hero and the last hope of the Jedi to Vader. "I'll get 'em."


	8. Hurt and Return

**VIII**

**Mission woke up** with hard-armored hands under her arms and knees. She flinched away from them a moment before she was dumped onto the white floor. Black boots paced in front of her. She scrambled to her feet. The Imperial officer who wore the boots surveyed her disdainfully with blue eyes in a wrinkled human face. His gaze left her quickly, and traveled over the three stormtroopers who stood behind her, then HK-47, who with an ion blaster held at his back by the last stormtrooper stood beside them.

"What is your function?" He asked the droid.

"Destroying meatbags and otherwise giving solace to my master, meatbag."

"Oh…An assassin droid without an Imperial license for operation? I feel sorry for your master. However," He addressed the stormtrooper with the ion blaster now, as if tired of referring to HK-47 in the second person and pining for the third; "It could be useful. Take it down to the tech for reprogramming."

"I think not," said HK-47 in the gleeful, low voice which Mission knew meant that someone was about to be killed. As soon as she turned to look and he moved, though, the ion blaster went off. A puff of steam escaped HK-47's chest panel and he collapsed forward.

"I trust it survived that?" asked the officer.

A stormtrooper nodded.

"Take it down to tech." He waved dismissively and the trooper armed against the droid bent to pick HK-47 up under the arms and drag him away. Mission realized that she was without her weapon and, suddenly, the center of attention. "Put her in a cell for questioning, and as a hostage." Said the officer. Mission could see the cells directly behind his desk, separated from the rest of the office by an impregnable red force field. "We'll question her later. Now, I wanna go home to the supper the Wookiee girl better've cooked me."

The two stormtroopers swept Mission off her feet and hurried her toward the force field. She flailed, trying to knock them off balance as she screamed insults at the officer as he walked out. She stopped when the trooper near her head squeezed her arms and said quietly, "Be glad he didn't order you put in the barracks instead."

**"We must rescue **them and get out of here, before they search the ships!" Leia stood in the center of the hideout's main room and shouted.

"They won't do anything until night," Han replied. "They're government employees, not carrion birds. Tomorrow we can go and reclaim the ships."

"Aren't you worried about the _Falcon_?"

"I am." He was stretched out on one of the comfortable couches against a wall. Everyone had discussed earlier what they were going to do tomorrow. Decisions had been made, but cursorily, leaving Leia dissatisfied with the lack of a formal leader and with time she felt was wasted with resting and resettling after the space voyage. Now Luke and the Wookiees were sleeping, in giant hammocks hung from the rafters of the next room. The remaining members of the _Ebon Hawk_'s crew were outside, presumably healing their wounds with the company of others. The droids had remained on the Falcon, safe. Darkness had come quickly to this part of Kashyyyk, seeming to rise up from the so-called Shadowlands instead of down from the turning of the sky. "But I'm glad we're safe. Chewie and Zaalbar are safe."

"You have changed." Leia peered at him. "You have changed." She smiled. "You care a bit more, don't you! I thought the Rebellion was just a bank account for you, sometimes. I thought…when I said…" Her crisp, politician's voice broke, and as she looked at him she seemed to see in his eyes orange reflections from the carbonite freezing chamber.

He wasn't going to say _I love you._ It was not in his nature, as it was not in the nature of her suitors on Alderaan to be as attractive as him, as dashing or upsetting or lucky. He wasn't, she thought, going to do anything besides sit there with his arms over the back of the couch as if to invite her to sit next to him.

And she would not, at this moment of fear, have it any other way.

**The small house **encircled the tree, and the walkway encircled that. Revan and Carth stood on the porch-like path farthest from the door to the hideout. Her head lay against his chest, his arms around her waist. The flesh and organs beneath his shirt felt so fragile against her back, so soft…a strange thing, she felt, to think about someone she loved. He was calmly looking at the trees and the moons, his line of sight far above her. She wanted to kiss the underside of his jaw. And yet…

She could paralyze him with a well-placed elbow. She could take him apart, could rupture his heart she felt beating against her back. It unsettled her, the thoughts she was having, and surprised her—

Perhaps there was some reason behind the teachings of the Order on nonattachment.

And how to tell him that, when all she felt was love?

Well did she know that he was not powerless; he was more skilled at piloting and strategy than she was, probably stronger in the basest physical way because he was a male. She should not pity him so.

Was it even pity? It wasn't, she thought. It was something else between them, between the way she thought and the way he did, probably not stemming from her past actions. She had dealt with them, and was content with herself.

But herself contained the Force, and he had never known it.

Or had he? There had been moments…when he seemed to have intuition or foresight like that the Jedi gained. And his son had become a Sith at the academy for darksiders on Korriban…

"Carth," she said.

"Gwen?"  
"If I told you that you could become a Jedi, would you accept the offer? If I told you that you had a little bit of Force-sensitivity?"

He looked down at her, eyes gleaming. "Why?"

"Because you may." She did not know what else to say and so did not, able to keep her voice firm although inside was turmoil. What would he think? What had she just done to the life of the person she needed most?

His answer relieved her, although hearing it from him allowed more acceptance of that relief than she had given herself. "The power the Jedi have, is great. It's invaluable. But I don't think it's for me. I know it's not something you can put down, like a hat. But I've been fine without it so far and, not to sound ridiculous, I think I'm too old for a new, cosmic world view." He laughed softly. "I'm not going to start having visions, am I?"

"No." She laughed too. "I will not test you then. But I don't want it to be a difference between us…"

"Was it before?"

"No," she said truthfully. She had a vision, then, not a supernatural one but simply a flight of imagination, in which a Force-powered Carth threw Saul Karath across the bridge of his capitol ship. He would take revenge…use the dark side, such as she had. Was it any less dark without such powers? His revenge had felt empty to him, until finding his son became his true goal…one that had failed, four thousand years in the past.

She turned and embraced him, one sinner to another, and without any psychic knowledge he knew to tighten his arms around her.

"We ought to get to sleep," he said close to her ear. "There's a lot to do tomorrow."

She nodded. "Okay." They walked around the pathway toward the house, passing Anna and Bao-Dur on the way. The Exile was leaning out over the railing, staring hollowly into the night; the Master-apprentice bond beat between her and the Zabrak with a tension Gwen did not see fit to interrupt. She understood the potential hurt she had inflicted on Anna by failing to advise her well on her relationships with the two men she taught. However, maybe the loss, however temporary, of Mical would concrete her opinions so that she could decide between them, if she was going to at all. Gwen passed her by, beginning to long for the hammock she had chosen inside.

**The Force surged **out of Anna, seeking.

She had not felt him die. He could be out there in the vertical jungle, unable to find her because of Kashyyyk's panoply of life and his own emotions, just as the same blocked her. What she knew of Bao-Dur's emotions, and he kept them quiet, tugged at her too. Again she felt childlike and indecisive, overwhelmed by her own thoughts even without Force-perceptions._ I don't feel like a Jedi Master. I don't feel like the woman who survived the Trayus Academy alone. Am I allowed to be human now?...I don't need this…_She turned and looked at Bao-Dur. He looked back, placid. The memory of the disastrous training session frightened her, but she knew what he thought of her, she thought.

He wouldn't mind when she threw her arms around him and buried her face against his chest, slightly uncomfortable against the equipment he carried. He put his right arm tightly around her and patted her back with the other hand. "I do not want to hurt you," he said, deep voice rumbling against her. She thought that he meant his arm of electricity and did not know how to reply. "I do not want to hurt you," he repeated, "and I do not know the Force as you do. Yet..I do not need you for the love which you need from me."

She looked up, confused.

"You need consolation now," he said. "I too need it." He sought for words and hurt when he said them, because he knew he was hurting her. "But you have always been the general to me. I cannot help you in this weakness in the way you want. It destroys the image I have of you. Preserve that for me. I _know _that you are strong. Endure."

Their eyes met and she saw the truth and hurt in him, the thoughts which had only been engendered when she fell against him, that he needed her to stand because she always had. He would tell her that she was strong, because such he believed, and he transferred some of that belief to her. But he did not imagine or no longer imagined love between them, and so he would speak instead of give it, and make her understand. He loved her as an apprentice can love his teacher, but no more, not here and now where more meant weakness.

As she gently, tentatively explored his thoughts, understood the rationales between them and the compliment he was giving her along with the disappointment, their Force bond strengthened. She drew away from him and nodded, remembering herself as she must be in his eyes; the woman on the jagged cliff on Malachor, shouting over the clamor of blasterfire and her own nervous Republic troops…

She could be that again.

The Force flowed happily between them, and so it was that when a third psychic presence intruded on the scene, Anna whirled and was frightened for how she and Bao-Dur must look at this moment—Mical stood far behind her on the porch, leaning on the railing, breathing heavily. His light-colored hair was matted with leaves and his tunic was stained; it was immediately apparent to Anna that he was no phantom but had survived the trackless jungle to get here, only to find his mentor and peer bonding, excluding him from a relationship that, based on his past verbal battles with Atton Rand, he was likely to, even if mistaken, find hurtful—

"Mical!" Anna cried. She ran to him. As she did she almost wished that the ground would shake beneath her, that there would be some physical sign of the mental turmoil she felt and knew he felt. She stopped before colliding with him, and looked carefully at the scratches he had accrued. "Mical, are you alright?"

"I have survived," he said, his polite manner intact, but he sagged against the railing. She held her hands out to heal and he pushed them away.

"It's not what you think—"

"I trust that you noticed that I almost fell to my death, and simply chose to ignore it. Would that be worse than complete ignorance? I do not know…" he pretended to think about it. "Or were you simply distracted?"

"It's not what you think," she repeated, her own breath ragged to match his. "I couldn't sense you. I didn't know whether you were dead or alive, overwhelmed as this place is by life and—people. I…" _know that I cannot say I'm sorry for this moment. _"Are you alright?" Again she stretched out her hands. "What happened to you?"

"I…fell," He looked out at the jungle, tired. "And was caught on a branch, and followed your presence. I've been climbing like a declawed Wookiee for hours, can I just get some tea--" He collapsed against the railing and this time did not protest when she helped him to walk, and channeled the Force though him.

Relief overwhelmed her guilt and she made him feel that; she set him on a couch in the first room inside the hideout. "Please tell the others, if they're awake, that he's safe," she told Bao-Dur. He nodded and met her eyes. "I'm sorry," she told him.

"For what, General?"

"For that awkwardness, for…" _being in love._

"Do not apologize." He went into the other room.

Anna sat with Mical and combed leaves out of his thick hair with her fingers, using Force-healing that flowed from her as her excuse. "I'm such a fool," she murmured. "You won't want me now, not as a master or as anything, when I failed and lost you…"

"That's not true," he said. His eyes were closed, his thoughts serene but jumpy, touching carefully on the subjects she knew had to be brought up. "I will admire you forever. But I see you as human, and faulty, now…and whether that makes you more or less admirable to me is not yet known."

"Thank you for speaking so frankly. I—"

"I trust the Force more now. But…I think," he smiled. "Were you an accomplished master, you would have said you let me fall on purpose, to teach me something."

She smiled too. "Would that have been cruel?"

"No. Birds are pushed out of their nests, Wookiees are sent into the Shadowlands to prove themselves."

"And what have I proven?" Anna murmured. "I...Bao-Dur and I were not…you didn't interrupt anything. Besides grieving."

They looked at one another for a time, unwilling to say any more, frightened or subdued. _Perhaps,_ she thought, _the very fact that I am frightened to embrace him now means something more. But this,_ she felt, _would be a terrible time for romance. Bao-Dur saw me as his superior officer. I know that Mical sees me as beautiful, and as a competent Jedi Master. Can I be all of those things? I don't know._

She sat with Mical until she fell asleep.


	9. Secrecy and the Dark Lord

_A/N: Woo, another long chapter. Happy holidays. Please concrit, especially on the many point of view changes in this chapter. _

IX

Han, Luke, and Gwen followed the two Wookiees along treacherous pathways through the trees. They utilized ladders, rope swings, and the occasional set of handholds really only intended for Wookiee claws, taking a back route to the Imperial station where they planned to rescue their teammates.

They had formulated two separate plans this morning before setting out to escape the planet. Luke's group was tasked with going to the station and releasing Mission and HK-47, using whatever method worked best, and, if the Force decided to bestow extreme favor upon them, get the launch codes needed to depart Kashyyyk legally. The definitely not-inconsiderable pilots in the party could depart illegally just as well, but Leia supported not committing crimes unless one absolutely had to.

Plan "A" involved Han and Gwen posting bail for the two captives and promising, with a well-placed mind trick or two, that they'd never disturb the peace again and in fact hadn't in the first place. Plan "B" involved the Wookiees coming out of the trees and tearing the Imperials' arms off. Uncharacteristically, Luke preferred the second plan.

He was not supposed to show his face to the Imperials, no matter the outcome—Vader was hunting for him furiously now. He had been put on this mission to balance out the number of Force-users in each—Leia's group had gone to retrieve the ships, also by whatever method worked the best. They had departed the hideout earlier, using the morning instead of the trees for their cover as they were not going to utilize Wookiee guides because only Han and Mission could speak Shrywook. They would fly the ships right over or under the Imperial base if they had to, whatever made it easy for everyone to get out. But that would be dangerous in the trees, and so either plan A or B included everyone in Luke's group running for the docks when Mission and HK-47 were with them. Luke feared forgetting these plans, because he did not like them. In his heart he did not want this sneakiness, this uncertainty—but only because it did not match his current, disturbing mood.

Yoda had told him that the basis for the dichotomy of Force-users was how Force-sensitive sentients could feel the powerful emotions of their enemy at the moment death. Sith loved that feeling. Jedi did all they could to prevent it. Luke's current opinion on the matter was one he thought more dangerous than the Sith's; he did not care. He wanted to see stormtroopers who had family waiting for them as statues to cut down, so that he could unleash himself. He wanted to feel the resistance of a lightsaber slicing through a body, he wanted to get hurt and have to focus on driving away the pain, because that would be so much _simpler _than thinking. He hated these thoughts. But he leaned forward eagerly when he arrived after Chewbacca on a wroshyr branch overlooking the Imperial garrison that they had fled yesterday.

Han's back was to Luke. "Ready?"

Dark-haired Gwen nodded.

They jumped from the wide branch to the roof of a thatched Wookiee house near the garrison, then slid down its sloped roof, onto a railing and then the walkway. Luke watched them work their way around to the front of the Imperial building, where they would enter by the front door like good citizens. Trees waving in the wind cast shadows over him; he saw the sunlight near the shadow of his hooded head darken.

Few people walked by below. Luke waited impatiently for Han and Gwen show some sign of progress.

**Mission was not **going to use the wiles a female Twi'lek supposedly had at her disposal to get the stormtrooper standing in front of her to give her more food. Tactics like that were for people like Lena, the tramp who'd ruined her brother's life. However, she did know how to converse at the level of whomever she was talking to at the time. "Is this what they give you too, barve?" she asked the helmetless, human soldier casually as he dropped a tray of white gruel in front of her.

He looked up rather warily, but he had a kind, young face. "Yeah."

"Tsk," she shook her head, preparing for a full spiel of empathy-inspiring words, but then, over the soldier's head, she saw Gwen and Han Solo walk into the office. She started and almost called out to them, realizing that they wouldn't hear her through the red force field. Solo started civilly talking to the officer, and the stormtrooper left the gruel and walked out of the cell, shoving the door locked behind him. Mission adopted a fierce expression of disappointment and poked the complimentary plastic spork into the gruel.

She watched as Gwen spoke to the officer while Han placed some credit chips on the table. The officer pressed a button on his desk. She'd be able to see from here if he had a hidden blaster…but the exchange remained civil. The stormtrooper on guard duty returned to her cell and lead her out of it by the arm, and allowed her to stand near Gwen, who looked at her grimly, silently bidding her not to say anything. Two stormtroopers practically pushed HK-47 out of a nearby doorway.

"The gods listened; we're getting rid of this thing!" one of them said, then glanced at the officer as if he had not been supposed to overhear; he quirked a corner of his mouth in a smile.

"Reminder: Declaration of the mortality of your mates and offspring is not dangerous to your well-being," said HK-47, deadpan.

"It's vaping _creepy_!" said the other shaken stormtrooper, and the two of them fled back through the door.

Mission had to agree. But she did not speak as Han thanked the Imperial officer, who waved the thanks away with a dazed sort of motion Mission identified with Force-bedazzlement. The four exited the office, onto the empty street outside. Mission stretched. Her confinement had not been utterly terrible because it had not been long, but the walls and bars had grown so _boring_! Now too she was able to ask the question that had been bothering her the most. "Is Zaalbar okay?"

"He's fine," said Gwen. "He's watching us right now, as backup."

Han's commlink beeped; he snatched it up, then spoke to Gwen. "Leia says the ships are secured."

"Good." She waved over her head. They walked casually along, and a few moments later Luke, Zaalbar, and Chewbacca joined them. Mission hugged her old friend as covertly as possible, relieved and excited.

A second after she thought everything was going to be okay, as she got a familiar whiff of Zaalbar's fur, Mission saw Gwen whirl around and heard the snap-hiss as she activated her lightsabers. The young Twi'lek turned too; a Mandalorian in pitted green and white armor was flying toward them with blasters pointed at their faces.

**The Imperials had **not tampered much with either of the ships. Their security systems were still activated when the second Rebel team arrived at the landing pad. Only a physical cordon hung across the walkway told that the two ships were under special authority.

Carth had easily entered the _Hawk _and Leia the _Falcon_. Han had provided her with the security codes and instructed her on how to ready the ship for takeoff as much as possible while not alerting anyone monitoring it outside. Apparently, and she was not surprised, he used this feature often. C-3PO and R2-D2 were safe and reassured inside. As co-pilot Leia had the tech specialist Bao-Dur. They sat silently for a while, awaiting the signal, conveyed via the Force, their untraceable communications array, from Gwen through Anna, which would tell her when the other group came running.

Leia also suspected that it would be useful to know in case that which often happened on such endeavors, the completely unexpected, happened. Which it did.

Bao-Dur spoke in his characteristic calm tone, but with a flinty gleam in his eyes. "They are under attack…by a Mandalorian."

"Boba Fett." He was the only person she knew of who still wore that armor. She reached for the joysticks. "Let's see how well he does against a starship."

The 'incoming comm' light flashed red and Bao-Dur opened communications with the _Ebon Hawk_. Outside the viewport she could see the other ship letting off steam and floating on its repulsors over the wooden dock. "I suggest you stay here," said Carth, his voice made tinny through the comm.. "Some of ours are running this way. I'll pick up the ones who stay and fight."

She knew he was thinking about Gwen. The Jed Master had Luke's willingness to jump in and try to be a hero. Leia had a new pessimism, a disbelief in every situation being able to be saved, since Alderaan, but she also knew that Jedi were driven by powerful morality. The red haze faded from her mind and she was surprised at her vehemence toward, if not her eagerness to attack, Han's captor. "Fine," she said to the comm. As the _Hawk _lifted up and flew forward, with Carth, Anna, and Mical aboard, she was thankful that Carth had taken the initiative. She could not see the village containing the Imperial office; the walkway curved into a thick group of trees in front of her, out of which, she presumed, Mission and others would soon come. The _Ebon Hawk _tipped and flew dangerously slowly to maneuver through the trees. If she honestly evaluated her piloting skills she knew it was best that she stay here.

But that did not mean she wasn't wishing to be with Han and Luke, and Boba Fett, utilizing her considerably better-honed blaster skills.

**Anna Sacul stood **at the _Hawk_'s closed ramp, prepared to jump out and rescue the other half of the party. She ran her hand idly along her double-bladed lightsaber. Mical stood calmly just behind and beside her. So many people against the single Mandalorian and whatever Imperials soldiers would be alerted to the battle—this should be easy.

The ship jockeyed carefully through the forest, then stopped, its engines a steady low hum as Carth utilized both repulsors and sublights. The ramp cracked open and extended, and she stepped onto its tilted surface, ready for anything—

Ready for Luke standing just in front of her, deflecting blaster bolts from the Mandalorian with a jetpack, a technology that amazed her. Han Solo, Mission, and the Wookiees ran toward the _Falcon_, the human shooting wildly at a handful of stormtroopers who had emerged from the office. Gwen stood just behind Luke.

Anna jumped off the ramp and ran toward the stormtroopers, shouting, "Revan, go!" Han dispatched the last soldier with a stun bolt, and as he did a hologram materialized just outside the white building. Usually used for public addresses and parade evaluations by some Imperial officer, it now showed a bulky, black-cloaked figure with armor and display lights across its chest. It wore a full helmet as well, with a triangular vocabulator that gave the sleek head the appearance of an angry dog. It looked around, and Anna stared up at it. Then the black lenses that served it as eyes turned to look at her. "At last. I have sensed your presence, mysterious Jedi," intoned a deep, mechanically-enhanced voice. When it—he, the Dark Lord—allowed her access to his thoughts, they were contemptuous and arrogant. _He knew when we arrived_, Anna thought frantically. _and sensed my casting out into the forest for Mical, my unrestrainable emotions. _

She stood still, surprised by the power she sensed from him—it rivaled Traya's or Sion's, and she had not suspected to find such in this day of persecuted Jedi—and that he was a hologram.

And, after she realized it, that she would have, if he hadn't been a hologram, smote him where he stood. She felt jumpy and sleepy, and cursed herself for it.

**Blaster bolts shrieked** toward Luke. He deflected the flurry with the green lightsaber Gwen had pressed into his hand while she wielded a violet one, but Boba Fett advanced. Luke's left foot crashed through the splintering walkway, and as he fell he cursed himself for deflecting a blasterbolt into the wood, or for disregarding Fett's plan—he caught himself on a tree branch, one arm of which supported the walkway. His blaster fell, spinning, into the darkness. The branch he hung from pointed out and down into the dark basement of the forest—bark slipped under his hands—

_Metal slipped under his hands as he gained his precarious balance underneath Cloud City, his breath catching in his throat in response to the pain tearing at his arm. _My father. _And the rush of emotions, including a frightening softness—as he lay in the bed on the _Falcon_, touching a Force presence stronger than Ben's, more understandable than Yoda's, and felt exhausted, treacherous, and terrible because he understood a bit of what the dark side meant to Anakin Skywalker—_

Luke blinked. Boba Fett stepped on the cracked floor boards above him, on his way to another victim, to Han or the Jedi—Luke reached up and grabbed Fett's ankle just below the armor. Surprised, the bounty hunter slipped and broke a larger hole in the walkway. He fell down beside Luke, but activated his jet pack and spun to face him. A curse hissed out of the t-shaped visor.

**"Darth Vader," the **Exile breathed, remembering the name and identifying the man-thing before her as a Sith Lord of this era. A powerful one—eerily he watched her with the eyes of the hologram and also with the Force from space above. "You are of the old Jedi, are you not?"

"Yes," She crouched, looking around for more enemies and finding none. She could hear Luke and the Mandalorian struggling beneath her feet—her allies had escaped, just as she'd wanted. The danger she sensed had come, not from the stormtroopers, maybe from the Mandalorian—but from how captivated she felt.

"You are not who I seek," Vader snarled, leaning forward as if he could tear out of the picture and truly stand before her.

_Not another one_, she thought, _or—have I become comfortable with Sith Lords? _So she opened herself up, and Vader's next, well-timed words condemned her in her own mind.

"I sense your weakness. You do not _believe _that you can defeat the Empire." The mechanical voice became almost soft, as she tried and failed to wrestle even the imagined specter of him out of her mind. "Your struggles with yourself do not concern me," Vader continued, and she concluded, maybe illogically, that his insult translated to a dismissal from the dark side—you're not important enough to be chased any more. You're one of many Jedi. You don't even know who you are or what you want, and Revan does.

The hologram faded off.

**Luke barely thought**; he swung one hand off the branch and slashed down as though it were a lightsaber. Fett was Force-pushed off course, flailing as he slid away under the walkway. Then he grasped a knot in the wood with one hand and a wire line _zing_ed out from the other wrist, narrowly missing Luke as the end of the line dug into the tree branch. Luke gritted his teeth and pulled himself up onto the branch. His feet placed, he somersaulted over the hole he and Fett had torn in the wood and ran toward the waiting _Ebon Hawk_.

Anna lurched in front of him, her face slack—he took her by the shoulders. "Are you alright?"

She nodded. They ran onto the ship. In the hallway she breathed heavily and touched the wall.

"Everybody on?" Carth's voice came from over his head through the internal comm.

"This is Luke, and Anna."

"Good. Hang on."

He ramp closed as Luke took steps toward the cockpit and looked back at Anna, to learn where it was on this ship. "Should I get to a gun?"

She nodded, face setting into her normal, composed manner, and led the way


	10. Clouds and Sky

_ I can't tell him. We don't have the time._

_But if I don't, am I doing the right thing? _

Han and Chewbacca guided the _Millennium Falcon _up through the atmosphere of Kashyyyk. Leia sat behind them, alternately watching the nav display and wondering whether she should tell Han about her next action.

"I'll take the top gun," she said softly, and ghosted away into the common room. Before she went to the ladder, she knelt before R2-D2 and spoke. "Artoo, get to the _Falcon_'s computer and send this message to Alliance High Command." She drew in a breath before adopting the formal tone she needed for the message. It had taken a good deal of thought during her wait on the _Falcon _to decide not to tell Han about this plan. Although Luke, Han, Leia, and Chewie had gotten good at working as individuals or a small team, Leia still had connections within the Rebellion, people who didn't care that she was princess of a dead planet instead of an active one. She had done wonders for the effort. Now she was going to call in some favors. "The _Millennium Falcon _has taken on an important independent mission and requires armed aid. This Artoo unit will periodically transmit narrow-band messages to you disclosing our location whenever possible. Code word: panther." She ended the transmission and looked at Artoo. "You know when not to transmit to reveal our location."

Artoo beeped an confidant affirmative–the floor shook.

Leia hurried to the turret gun. Bao-Dur was already at the other one, and she hoped he would be reliable.

Kashyyyk's atmosphere became the wispy floor of black space. A Star Destroyer waited for them in the blackness, TIE fighters in ready formations around it. The _Ebon Hawk _juked, and as Leia watched an odd, half-ovoid ship that she attributed to Boba Fett skimmed its top surface, dangerously close, then dove below it and headed for the _Falcon_.

"I hate being important," Leia heard Han grumble.

A wall of TIE fighters in their characteristic groups met the two escaping ships. Han sent the _Falcon _soaring away from them, curving so that the TIEs and Star Destroyer sat above them; Leia lost sight of the _Hawk _as TIEs approached her turret. She squeezed the trigger. Laser blasts lanced out, catching one TIE on the ball cockpit and tearing it apart, searing the wing from another–but immediately another team of three was in her targeting field, and their screams assaulted her ears.

"There's too many of them," Han said.. "Head back to the planet. We'll lose the TIEs in the atmosphere and see if we can go around–what, Chewie?"

Carth's voice: "They could wipe the planet out to get to us."

Han replied, "No. It's got resources the Imps want."_Wookiee slaves, _Leia thought angrily.

"We can lay low in the jungle or get to the nightside. "

There was silence from the comm for a moment as Han executed dizzying turns. Rays of light flashed past Leia's viewport.

"Fine," Carth said, disembodied, and the _Falcon _turned away from the battlefield. It dipped down and skimmed the curve of the planet, turning the scene of battle into one of an ocean of pristine clouds. Han must have given Carth coordinates, because when the _Falcon _dove into the atmosphere, Leia's stomach feeling like it jumped into her throat even though the gravity of the turret was rigidly controlled, she could see the _Hawk _tearing through the clouds some distance away, parallel to their path. A blip that wasn't shaped like a TIE fighter appeared on her scope.

She swung the gun around to see a tiny, black probe droid following the _Falcon _in, spindly legs tucked behind it and red heat washing off its rudimentary shield. Others fell around it, specks of dirt in the white clouds. She positioned it in her targeting reticle and fired, but the shots still lanced around the small machine.

Someone from the _Hawk _scored on a probe droid, its metal casing exploding into red-hot sparks and debris. The clouds were thinning as they fell– "Han, probe droids on our tail," Leia commed calmly.

In the next moment she and Bao-Dur shot true at the same time; two probe droids exploded. The clouds were thick again as if Han were flying horizontally, creating distance between the two friendly ships and the Imperials. Where, Leia thought in a moment of fear, was Boba Fett? Her stomach lurched again as a landscape, ocean and shore and forest, appeared before her as the _Falcon _dropped out of the clouds. The trees rushed up at her, and the probe droids were lost to sight. Fear flooded her; if any were remaining and still transmitting, they would see where the _Falcon _landed even if they were destroyed afterward–

But she could not know, and had to trust that the others of her team knew that the droids had to be taken out in the sky. Trees much smaller than those she had seen elsewhere on Kashyyyk enveloped the _Falcon_ as it landed.

Carth spoke quietly through the comm, narrow bandwidth lending his voice the conspiratorial whisper it would have affected with proximity. "All their scouts are down. What's our next move?"

"We'll wait here for a minute, see if they don't move on. Is your ship damaged at all?" Han replied.

Heavy footfalls echoed in the corridor below Leia as Han waited for the other pilot's reply. After the clangs passed by, the hisses and clicks of the idling ship around her sounded spidery and covert to Leia, who felt trapped in her turret. She could go walk around, could put her hand on Han's shoulder, but the gun could be needed at any time.

_And Han doesn't need to know that I'm tense and scared._

'Ah, we've got a problem," Han said. "One of our deflector plates fell and hit a fluid line, we can't move. We gotta go out to fix it."

"Our fuel's almost depleted, but otherwise we're set." Carth said. "I'll keep an eye out for you."

"Yeah..."

"Luke wants to know if you think the _Ebon_ _Hawk _can take modern fuel."

"I don't know. I'll have to take a look at your engine. Do you have enough for another jump? Zaalbar and the killer droid, come with me please, the Imps aren't the only weird animals around here." His voice began to trail off as he spoke to other crewmembers.

"Enough for a jump of a few systems, yeah. May the Force be with you."

Han did not reply. Leia added her silent encouragement to Carth's stated one, then spoke, realizing a much more practical application of the traditional blessing. "Can we send a couple Jedi to assist him? Luke?"

"Gwen's going to check," Carth said.

Leia gripped the joysticks in front of her so hard that her hands paled, and fearfully she watched the dim targeting screen.

**Asking about the **fuel had been a release of one clear thought from one thousand muddy others. Anna and Gwen had taken the co-pilot's and gunner's positions during the brief sortie with the TIE fighters, leaving Luke sitting in the common room, itching for his X-Wing's controls and thinking of his third most immediate problem after the Imperial ships and Boba Fett–Darth Vader, who had consequently risen back to his normal place as problem number one.

Therefore, after the battle, Luke and Anna sat in the _Hawk_'s common room with its unusually large holoprojector and thought upset, half-understood thoughts about the Dark Lord _together_.

She had said something like, "He dredges too deep, into thoughts I don't want–what is he? A droid?"

"He was human once," Luke replied, and, remembering Ben Kenobi's half-true history lesson, wished to say no more about it

This double portion of despair did not improve the moral of the other Jedi on board. After Han decided to go outside, a conversation Luke had been listening to from a distance, Gwen stalked into the room and whipped up waves in the water of the despairing minds so hard that Mical poked his head around a corner to see what was happening. To Luke, the jolt of clarity felt like a bucket of stimcaf and then a cool breeze. It left his head clearer, just in time for him to focus on the spike of distress emanating from Han.

**As Han stepped **out of the _Falcon _and into the Kashyyk forest, where trees adapted to the coastline grew no higher than those found on Corellia or Dantooine, he felt eager to ask Zaalbar about his history. The younger Wookiee had been quiet so far, but Han had overheard Chewie telling him about Han's own traits; his fluency in Shrywook and the life debt he was owed. A dependable, good Wookiee was dependable and good with all his or her heart, and having another one as an ally did not bother him even when everyone else did. Luke, for example, seemed to be moving farther and farther away into esoteric realms Han didn't care about, and the Corellian would be disappointed if the ratio of fun conversations to flares or downcast looks that were probably about Leia continued on its downward trend.

As Han rounded the side of the _Falcon_, gratefully switching his attention to mechanical matters, HK-47 spoke.

"Observation: There are three beings moving this way, attempting to remain concealed."He sounded strangely gleeful.

Han touched his blaster. "What kind of beings?"

Chewbacca answered: Wookiees and a slaver.

The species name synonymous with 'slaver' in the Wookiee speech was 'Trandoshan'. The reptilians had hunted Wookiees for sport and as a part of their religion for centuries before the Empire started paying them for live ones. To find the two species traveling together was incredibly odd–

HK–47 raised his blaster at the forest and paused for a moment, looking significantly at Han. Zaalbar and Chewbacca growled wordlessly, but Han forced himself not to draw his weapon until he knew whether those who approached were friend or foe.

The mysterious, mismatched beings loomed out of the woods, fangs bared and weapons aimed at the waiting Rebels.


	11. Musing and Metal

XI

The taller of the two Wookiees spoke, dark brown braids flapping around his shoulders as he shook his leonine head to emphasize angry words. "Who are you, sneaking through our forest like a panther?" he asked in Shriiwook.

Han could not tell who the three newcomers were associated with, but hesitating to answer would not be a good idea whatever the circumstances. He judged that it would be wisest to divulge a portion of the truth. One hand remained on his holstered blaster. "My friends and I, our ships are damaged. We had to land, and now, I was just going to make some repairs. We're not looking for any trouble."

The dark-furred Wookiee's stare descended from Chewbacca to Han, as if he had not expected the human to speak. He seemed to nod.

The second Wookiee wore gauntlets and carried a bowcaster like the first. The Trandoshan was outfitted like a living tank, wearing thick armor of a blue material that Han did not recognize and carrying a long rifle, with a variety of vibroshivs attached to its armored legs. Han did not know of any criminal organizations on Kashyyyk—and Imperials did not outfit aliens like this. It was possible that they were rebels of one sort or another, but how to question them without giving away information about Han's own loyalties? _Hell_, he though, _our faces are probably on every Imperial wanted list in the galaxy. The fact that these guys aren't shooting is practically an expression of loyalty._

"What _side _are you on?" the more talkative Wookiee impatiently growled.

Then the Trandoshan poked the Wookiee's arm with one long claw and gestured at something behind Han; the Wookiees broke their stares away from the human and looked over his head. Just after they did, they shuffled backwards and raised their weapons.

Han began to say 'wait', and then he saw what they did. From behind HK-47 glided a person shrouded by a black cloak. Anna's cloak, but this person didn't move like her... Unnaturally deep shadows obscured his face; he raised one hand and spoke in a voice Han barely recognized. "You are allies. You serve the same cause. The one that I serve."

He raised his head. The hood and shadows fell away. With his revealed left hand, fingers spread and never touching the fabric, he moved aside a fold of his black cloak to show a lightsaber against his leg.

It was Luke, Han saw, with a new, nuanced voice that erased any trace of the farm boy's naiveté and replaced it with untouchable authority.

"You're of the Rebellion?" The dark Wookiee huffed.

"Yes," Han replied.

"We heard you had a Jedi," said the second Wookiee. "We have a small outpost here, a tiny resistance against the…disgusting business on our world. But we will help you."

Han relaxed his hands. "Thank you, very much. And thanks, kid."

Luke smiled back.

The Kashyyyk Rebels stared with increasing intensity and interest as the rest of Han's party emerged from the _Ebon Hawk _and the _Millennium Falcon. _Luke handed Anna the cloak and Gwen the lightsaber, and smiled when he told of the rescue, as if the darkness had been an act. He had sensed the Wookiees' intent, and after Leia ran out of the _Falcon _and gave Han a swift, heartfelt kiss, she corroborated the new allegiance.

"The code word is 'panther'," she said regally to the dark Wookiee, who nodded enthusiastically; Han relayed his reply and apologized to Leia for not remembering and picking up on the word. Her relieved smile, and the memory of the kiss, did wonders to assure him of his innocence in her eyes.

"I am Rolworr," said the dark-furred Wookiee. "My companions are Hyvokka, and Lisk." He looked pointedly at Chewbacca and Zaalbar. "She has abandoned the ways of the slavers' gods to help us against the Empire."

Chewbacca barked his approval warily.

In the midst of the forest a short walk away, what looked like a hut made of rough wood was revealed to be the entrance to an underground bunker. "Few Imperial scouts fly over this area," Rolworr explained to Han as they made their way down a wooden-sided tunnel. "Your ships should be safe."

'We could use help with repair and refueling."

"That need can be met. But you should not stay long; we have food and room enough only for those who live and work here."

"Ah, that's fine. Then we'll try not to stay long."

Leia touched Han's elbow. "What are you saying?"

He relayed Rolworr's words, then quietly asked, "Where are we traveling to next?"

"I don't know. Dagobah, if Luke and Master Bolwyn continue on that path."

Wooden doors opened at Rolworr's touch. The facility seemed more administrative than militaristic; poured ferrocrete walls clashed with wooden slats as with rock on Yavin IV, but otherwise, relatively little technology was in evidence. The bunker had no room for a starship hanger. After a time, a door that Rolworr opened revealed the other occupants of the base; Wookiees and a female Mon Calamarian sitting around a card table. They, Rolworr, and the Trandoshan, Lisk, conferred, then the Mon Cal turned her bright violet eyes to Han and his companions. He noticed that the people he had brought nearly doubled the population of the base.

"We'll help you with your ships," she said. "It's so good to see someone else who's going to fight their way out of the Empire's hold."

How literal that hold is here, Han thought. _We've never seen or heard of these people before, and they're risking their freedom and lives against odds so overwhelming, some Wookiees are resigned to having slavery as part of their culture. Imperial cruelty and technology overpower their physical might, until the rebellious ones have to go into hiding. _He felt kinship to these desperate Wookiees unlike that he felt for the Alliance High Command. An elderly Wookiee woman had been one of his only friends in his teenage years, and because of his longtime friendship with Chewbacca, he felt almost as if his family, if he had known them, would have lived by Wookiee ways. It was with a sort of relief that he went with Leia, Shifan the Mon Cal, and a few native mechanics to tend to the _Falcon _just as Carth, Master Sacul, and Bao-Dur tended to the _Hawk _with their attendant Rebels.

Luke did not share his friend's elation. When they arrived at the ships, the young man touched Han on the arm and said that he was going to look around the surrounding forest.

Han nodded. "Take care of yourself, kid."

"I'm a lot better at than then I used to be." Luke gave a tight smile and walked away.

Only later did Han think that, judging by how enthusiastic Luke usually was about machines, something might be wrong.

**Luke trudged through **the forest, unable to appreciate the beauty all around him. Once, trees, like oceans or starships, had been wonders to him; how magnificent had the forests of Yavin IV appeared! Their brethren on Kashyyyk were even more lush and gravity-defying, but Luke ignored them. He focused on the rhythm of his strides through the undergrowth, or on the beating of his heart as he occasionally broke into a run so that it pounded like a drum in his ears. Small things, details, drew him now. The trees stretched up to the stars, where Vader waited.

Although it had been the plan all along, he was not eager to go to Dagobah now. The certainty and uncertainty of his parentage were a rock and a hard place. His defensive response was apathy, a willingness to exist in sadness and do nothing to change it. Nor did he like this unfamiliar sensation.

The sunlight, broken into rays but undimmed by the canopy of low, sand-fed wroshyrs, slanted down to either side of the wondering Jedi. The nearby sea cast the smell of minerals into the clear, comfortably warm air.

_If this were a story_, Luke thought, _I'd have the princess by my side. _He had been proud of himself after training on Dagobah, had felt strong and adult, while Han had—

It was the work of a moment and a breath to smooth such thoughts away. Yoda had preached nonattachment, and although Luke would not abandon his friends to death, he was beginning to see how romantic relationships between a Force-sensitive and someone who was not, or even between Force users, were complicated things, perhaps more so than relationships not involving extra-sensory perception. He was content without mock-fighting over Leia. After his initial awe, she was beginning to feel more like a teacher, or a sister, than a commanding officer or object of desire.

_Master Bolwyn and Carth Onasi get along perfectly._

_Ah yes, that other problem of mine, where I'm nervous about learning from these amazing Jedi because they're supposed to be—are!-- extinct._

_Master Yoda and Ben would have had me sacrifice Han and Leia to save myself from…Vader. And all that he implies._

_They _lied _to me. What really happened? Ben said Vader killed his apprentice._

_"__**Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father."**_

_They knew one another. And so…maybe my teachers felt ashamed, because they never stopped him, and now I'm the only one who can._

_The answer to all these questions is…Jedi too are human._

_What if I send Master Bolwyn and the others to fight Vader for me?_

The Force seemed to raise a hand at that half-serious suggestion, and dismiss it. Then, in a rush, Luke sensed someone unfamiliar nearby him. He looked around and jumped straight up. He landed in a crouch on the thick branch of a tree and pressed himself back against the bark. The Force, the dappled shadows, and his olive-green uniform concealed him; he watched and listened as a shrub, below him and a few meters away, rustled. A rough voice emerged from that direction, crackling with static.

"Stall at least Skywalker, Solo, and the other Jedi in the base for a few more days. I'll be ready for them this time."

Luke heard the comm click. The bushes moved again, closer to the tree where he perched. He sensed that the one below was aware that he or she was being watched. He jumped down and ran for the _Falcon_, silencing his steps as he had been taught.

_**When people travel **__together long enough_, Gwen thought, _they become comfortable with each other on a level that doesn't require speech. It certainly helps when they're all Jedi, but that's not essential at all. Something happens to the flow of conversations—you can tell that everyone's relaxed, and expressing an intrinsic respect behind their words and actions. _

These thoughts were inspired by Anna, Mical, Mission, and Princess Leia, who sat resting in the _Ebon Hawk_'s common room. Gwen too had just come from working on the _Falcon_'s damaged exterior and overseeing the refueling of the _Hawk_—the fuel of the future would apparently work for it, taking into account some modifications Bao-Dur was more than capable of making.

Funny too, thought Gwen, how so many of Anna's allies during her fight with the Sith had turned out to be Force-sensitive, and newly so. Gwen would not mind an apprentice, one whom she could lead to the light side as she had lead Malak—_and he lead me_, she reminded herself—to the dark. If only Carth…perhaps Luke Skywalker would come to her, although she thought it better not to ask him directly. He had a revelation to contend with, and she did not know him well enough to craft an appropriate stage for that contest. She could tell that the Force of this age was recovering from a period of darkness, and was now humming like a lit lightsaber with potential. As a Jedi Master she could catch glimpses of the future, but they manifested not as specific visions but as a general feel for the timeline before her. This era was gearing up for a clash no less great than her own versus Malak had been.

She smiled as she quietly entered the common room, not wanting to disturb the conversation going on inside.

Anna was saying, "So I just wanted to say I'm sorry. For not being a reliable mentor."

Mical returned Gwen's smile with a small one of his own as he saw her enter; then he continued speaking to the former exile. "I believe that you still are, ah, recovering. Darth Traya manipulated your mind, tugged on your heartstrings, long before she thought to challenge you with the lightsaber."

Anna nodded.

"But that's using Traya as an excuse, sorta," said Mission thoughtfully. "I don't mean to sound as nasty as I just did, but, bad things happen." She forestalled Mical's reply by raising one blue hand. "I know that having your mind messed with by the Sith and going through the rough childhood I had are two very different thing, but being optimistic helps. So does being what you are. I'm not living in the shadow of my brother anymore." After glancing at Gwen, she added, "Gwen isn't Darth Revan anymore. People look up to you now and, love you, and you're going to rebuild the Jedi Order when you get back to our time. Act like that, and even if this sounds silly, you'll start to feel like you _are _that."

'Thanks," said Anna. "I'll remember that. It's just…I spoke to Darth Vader, before we left the upper levels of Kashyyyk. He looked right through me—he was looking for Luke. He dismissed me, and said I was weak."

"Bluster," Princess Leia said suddenly and rather angrily. "The Empire cultivates fear. Often it can back up its claims. But you, Anna, you're a Jedi Master. One of two in the galaxy. Two active ones, anyway. You have power so many people could never have."

"Thank you," Anna said again. Gwen sensed surprise from both people involved as Anna placed her hand lightly on Mical's.

Gwen walked to the center of the room. "Am I interrupting?"

"No," Anna replied quickly.

Gwen smiled. "I would like to ask about this Darth Vader," she said. She looked at Leia.

The princess said, "He controls the military might of the Empire…and is the emperor's public face. Or his fist. He has the power of the Force just as you do. And he did something that Luke will not speak of."

Gwen sensed the young Jedi approach and enter the ship, as if summoned by his name. She asked Leia, "Do you know Vader's origins?"

"No. He helped the emperor kill all the Jedi, during the creation of the Empire, but it was before I was born."

"Hello." Luke appeared at the hall from the ramp.

"How are you?" Leia asked.

"Good." He passed his hand over his brow. "Can I get a drink of water? I've got something important to tell you."

"I've got it," Mission said, and before anyone else replied she dashed off to the store room.

"You were talking about the birth of the Empire? How, ah, how old are you, Leia?"

"Twenty-two."

"Heh, me too. That's funny. I always thought of you as older."

"I don't often get the chance to act my age," Leia said. "When is your birthday?"

"The second mist month by Tatooine time…" He smiled sheepishly as he calculated mentally and on his fingers. "That's fifth month, nineteenth day by Imperial Center time.Thanks," He accepted a plastic cup Mission handed him; she padded back to her seat.

"Really, ha, that's my birthday," replied Leia.

"Wow." He laughed, as did Gwen, but he quieted quickly, and looked with suddenly wide blue eyes at Leia. "I overheard someone talking in the forest outside the base," he said. Nervously Leia tapped her fingernails on the couch to either side of her legs. "Someone's selling us out."

"Talking to Vader?"

"No. It was a distorted voice that came through the comm, though."

"Boba Fett." Leia murmured. "It was just one person taking the message, on this side? Do you think all of these Rebels are in on it?"

"It sounded like just one person, but I didn't see him. I told Han; he suspects the Trandoshan."

"Of course he does," she replied without barb. "But we can't know that. You have no idea who it was?"  
He shook his head. "I could identify the presence again if I felt it."

Eagerly, Mission said, "He can keep an eye out for that. Er, a thought. And I'll use my stealth belt to wonder through the base. I can speak Shriiwook, Huttese, any number of things they might use. I'll listen and look for anything suspicious."

Luke sat down beside Leia, his long fingers laced together. "Stealth belt? It blocks optic rays? I thought something that could do that had to be made big enough to mount on a capital ship."

"It didn't in my time."

"All right, we've got the advantage then. I don't see anything wrong with that plan."

"Be careful," said Leia.

Anna added, "You ought to begin tomorrow. It's getting late."

"Don't get caught." Luke added. The weariness had dropped from his voice. Gwen was relieved by his next words, as they mirrored her own misgivings. Mission scoffed, but he continued; "If our allies aren't betraying us, we don't want to make it look like we're betraying them."

**Slightly later in **the day, Mical's overwhelming happiness was partially doused by the fact that in the last place he looked for some solitude, he found HK-47. The droid was standing in the Rebels' base, in a supply closet which was barely large enough to admit him. He was running his hands along the pitted stock of some sort of assault rifle when the historian saw him from the hallway and peered in.

"Are you supposed to be in there?"

"Answer: Yes. I am widely regarded as an expert on weapons, and was permitted by the owners of this closet to examine these. Reluctant admission: Their capability often outshines that from our own time."

"Are they very different from what we use?"

"Simple Analysis: These blasters are similar in appearance to those of our time, but are more efficient and powerful."

"Ah, might I get the names of some of these weapons, or perhaps images?"

"Hesitant reply: Yes. However, while no cognitive protocol I possess explicitly warns against time travel paradoxes, I feel rather uneasy about accessing files in our time which were created in the future."

Throughout this speech, the droid's words had affected the disturbingly musing quality they sometimes did, and Mical saw unbidden mental images of HK-47 stealing a gun from the Rebellion to use in the past. The droid would take such an advantage without hesitating if it had been someone besides himself who spoke of time travel paradoxes, Mical thought, and it was odd for him to voice such a warning. Mical thought guiltily of the datapad sitting on his own bunk, which contained pages of notes about this future world. He had recorded them himself, in the spare time that was so abundant in space.

_Revan mentioned that she knew something about time travel. I ought to ask her—and ask Bao-Dur if he has given the crystalline artifact further study._

"Thank you," he said as goodbye to HK-47, and moved on down the hall. Occasionally he smiled. Thoughts of the crystal had made him wonder when they would be able to consult Skywalker's Master and return home; he missed his family, even though, because of his career, he usually only saw them through holotransmissions from Coruscant. However, his sense of adventure was now completely satisfied. During their last conversation, the Exile's emotions had all been laid bare for him. Their relationship needed mending after his fall. But he was sure that it would be mended, sure that he would have another memory to cherish, to turn over like a rune-marked stone beneath the magnifying glass of his mind. Just before their most recent conversation, where she broke down in front of him, Mission, and Princess Leia and began the process of rebuilding her confidence, she had bluntly confessed that Bao-Dur wasn't interested in being his rival for her affections. Mical was unsure whether he was going to speak to the Zabrak about it at all. Perhaps it would be enough that sparring sessions would no longer be so awkward.

Mical had his adventure, had his studies, and would have his fair love.

Life felt good.

Even if Luke's reports of treachery hidden around them were true.


	12. A Surfeit of Trust

_A/N: Would anyone be opposed to the idea of this plot running into and becoming an AU of both _Shadows of the Empire _and _Return of the Jedi_? It seems like it's going to, even though I didn't think that was a good idea before. _

XII: A Surfeit of Trust

_**Four Thousand Years Ago**_

Limat Whitesun warily watched the occupants of the Tarisian cantina. She had lived a quiet life on Druckenwell until the age of thirteen, when a visiting Jedi explained why things tended to explode during her mood swings. She had then gone to the academy on Telos and endured much under the hands and eyes of Master Visas Marr. It hadn't quite been prepared her for the cacophony, the dimness, and the fashion sensibilities of the cantina patrons.

Master Marr couldn't _see_ the place at all…but she had found the man she had wanted to meet, and was talking to him in intense, low tones. She wore the common, brown and white robes of the Jedi, as did Limat. Visas also wore a red hood trimmed in gold, which obscured her empty eye sockets.

The man across the table from them wore a ribbed vest over a blue, collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His left arm was in a sling; the bone must have shattered in an inaccessible place to warrant such treatment.

"She's been gone for over a month," Visas said.

"She was going to the Unknown Regions to find Darth Revan and mysterious Sith. _Unknown Regions_." He shrugged. "We don't have a guarantee that she's coming back."

"We do—Admiral Onasi was going to send regular reports."

"I don't know much about Admiral Onasi. But Anna left." He made to get up, and Visas stretched out a hand toward him. He sat down again, eyes flicking back and forth.

"Is someone hunting you, Captain Rand?"

"Nah. No one."

"Then you don't need to look so frightened. I want to help you if I can. My apprentice, Limat, needs to practice her healing. Her inexperience will not hurt you."

"And what will I owe you for that?"

"Nothing."

Limat stretched her hands out toward Rand's sling. A soft glow lit the air between them. Visas said, "You were a friend of mine, one of few, like all of our ragtag crew were. You were also a friend of the Exile. She may contact you, and I'm asking you not as a Jedi, but as a friend, to pass on that message if it comes."

Rand leaned closer to Visas. "Anna would have healed me. She knew I got hurt. But when we talked, it was so awkward…she just wanted to escape another war. Bury herself in the Jedi Order. She won't call me before she'd call you."

"Why is that, do you think?"

"I don't know! She forgave Bao-Dur…she didn't even know Revan, and she forgave her! But not me."

"Maybe that's how she could forgive Revan. Anna was emotionally attached to you, in one way or another. Revan could be easily labeled—she'd gone back to the light side. Her attachment to you was not that distant, so it will take more time to forgive what you once did."

"I've gone back to the light side!" He threw up his hands in frustration, then realized what he'd done and wiggled his arm out of the sling, revealing white wraps underneath. For a moment he looked at his arm, but incredulity was not his dominant emotion; he was used to seeing healings. He did smile."Nice work, kid.

"I just haven't gone back to the Jedi," he continued.

"You could."

"I could also be a respected pilot who, because of you, can now get back to work and not think about how miserable most Jedi have made his life. Have a good day, Visas and Padawan."

Atton Rand got up, and this time Visas let him go. He walked out, the droid T3 following his feet.

_**4 ABY**_

Mission walked into the Rebel base. All she could see of herself was a shimmering, a faint outline of distorted air where her body should be. Anyone watching would mistake her for heat waves, or a trick of the lighting. It gave her a sense of freedom and power, just as sneaking around in the Undercity of Taris had. However, on this mission there was less fun, more uncertainties. Any data she found which proved someone's treachery could be used. She was wary of trying out the one computer the base had because the security systems of the future could be tighter. She also kept in the back of her mind the unsettling thought that the _Ebon Hawk _and _Millennium Falcon _ought be searched once too before she publicly reappeared. Although she didn't like the idea at all, it was possible that someone she thought was an ally would have sold them out if it was possible that a Rebel could.

She traveled on as the tunnel sloped down. The first door was white and sealed, with a keypad next to it where one could type in a password. She entered 'panther'.

The door opened. Mission smirked and walked inside. The first few doors she passed to either side of the corridor were open, revealing small armories and a room containing a desk and computer. The first large room was the dining hall; she circled the long, plastic table and peered into the food prep room, which contained only one old-looking prep unit and a few wooden pots.

The next few doors down the hallway were locked, and she would need a key card instead of a password to get into them. The first method of attaining a key card that she thought of was killing its owner—and she chided herself, because these weren't planet-killing Sith or oppressive Imperials. They were allies, and it was going to be interesting to see what happened when a spy was revealed in their midst. The occasional person passed by without noticing her, but many, she remembered from a report Rolworr had sent the _Hawk_, had gone out hunting this morning to augment their kitchen's meager menu.

The hallway curved after it passed these doors, presumably because of the lay of the land. To her left, another door fitted with a keypad led to what she remembered was the meeting room. Ahead of her, the hallway curved too sharply for her to see what was beyond the wall. She continued to follow the curving corridor, and came to three doors, one to the left, one to the right, and one, this one also locked with a password, straight ahead. The other doors were closed, but not locked. Carefully she turned one on.

It slid away into the wall, and she moved through into the females' dormitory. It was laid out generally like the _Hawk_'s dormitory was, with the beds to either side and the middle of the room open, but the beds were of varied designs and even types; some spaces were filled with hammocks suspended from the ceiling. A Wookiee sat on a nearby, conventional bed and appeared to be clipping its toenails. Mission could see the Trandoshan woman also, lying on her front in a bunk bed with a bright light in the ceiling above it, apparently asleep.

Various belongings were placed around the beds or on them, also just like in the _Hawk_. Mission thought for a moment. She could find out the contents of containers while wearing the stealth belt, but turning datapads on or making noise by climbing onto beds would be a bit conspicuous. She needed a distraction…

The young Twi'lek edged back to the door, took a grenade from her belt, squeezed the sides to activate it, and threw it into the hallway.

A roar exploded into the room from the corridor. The Wookiee immediately looked up, hands coming to the sides of her head and fur standing on end from the sonic grenade. She rushed out the door.

The Trandoshan twitched in her sleep.

Mission concealed a laugh behind her hand. She could imagine the reptilian being confronted by the Wookiee when she woke up; _I can't believe it Lisk, you slept through a sonic grenade!_ Knowing how Mission herself felt in the mornings, she thought that Lisk would be proud.

Or, she could even now know that an intruder was in the room, and be lying in wait.

Mission knew that Trandoshans didn't have the fantastic sense of smell that Wookiees did, and so far none of them had detected her. So she proceeded to search the room as quickly as possible. She turned on several datapads in the room and turned them off again, as a systems scan showed little more than basic features and communications the owners had sent to their family. Mission even climbed to Lisk's bunk and looked over her sleeping form for anything she might be keeping on the bed, but there was nothing.

She needed to check the males' room next.

It was set up similarly, although apparently some things were universal between humans, Twi'leks, and Wookiees—although the males had about the same amount of belongings, they managed to look messier. Less floor was visible between the beds. Flags with Wookiee designs on them were hung on some parts of the walls.

Three Wookiees were in here, sitting by a bed and playing a card game which was probably called "Kroyie", as that was what they occasionally shouted. The shouting, and the door being closed, probably explained why the sonic grenade hadn't bothered them either. Mission walked carefully around them and began peering into bags and piles of belongings. A bedroll near the end of the room had a datapad on it. She turned it on and looked through the different files and communications. There was one that had no name of a planet and town where its destination should be indicated; instead there were just numbers, which looked like they indicated a point in space. A point that wasn't a Rebel or friendly or even anImperial ship that wanted to give its name.

Boba Fett.

It wouldn't do to replay the communication here where others could hear it…or would it? If the listening Wookiees thought that the datapad had turned itself on, Mission could see whether their response indicated that they knew about the betrayal or if the traitor was working alone. If he wasn't, she could sneak out without being noticed. If he was she'd still get out; she didn't think it would be a good idea to reveal that she had been spying without the Rebel's permission, even if it was against a common enemy. Judging by Luke's reaction, stealth belts weren't used anymore, so the Rebels wouldn't think to search for someone utilizing one against them.

She pressed 'play'.

_"Your targets are here," _said a Wookiee voice. The three in the dormitory looked up in surprise, but didn't immediately go get the apparently malfunctioning device. "That's Chatyyk's", one said.

Luckily, Mission realized with a start, Chatyyk wasn't in the room. His voice continued, _"Staying at the base. I know you don't expect this from a Rebel, but…I don't have a credit to my name. I can't do my share in getting supplies here. It's like everyone else is staring at me all the time because I'm poor…even though they're not." _The Wookiees in the dormitory were riveted now, just looking at the datapad and surely thinking about their roommate. _"Please don't hurt anyone else. But I've been in Imperial custody before, and I know that Han Solo and his Jedi friend are on the top of the wanted list. Take them. Give me a share of the bounty. It'll help both of us."_

_"You're willing to betray your friends to get credits from me? You better be. Now that I know you're on the wanted list too." _Fett's voice sounded angry—or maybe the distortion from the helmet made him sound like that all the time.

Chatyyyk gave off a high-pitched whine, the Wookiee equivalent of a nervous stutter.

Fett continued, "_Stall at least Skywalker, Solo, and the other Jedi in the base for a few more days. I'll be ready for them this time."_

The message ended.

The three Wookiees in the dormitory immediately stood up and growled curses at Chatyyk. Then they ran out the door to find him, one dashing over to near where Mission stood and scooping up the datapad as evidence.

_Wookiee rage_, she thought. Instead of having a trial they're going to hunt him down and…not kill him, but not treat him very nicely, either. _I wouldn't. Even if the guilt from being poor is almost an understandable reason to want to get credits from the nearest, rich source…_

_The Empire._

_And does he have a way to contact Fett, to tell him that the plan has failed?_

_He might._

Mission sprinted down the hallway after the Wookiees, determined to reach her friends.

**Chatyyk was caught **before she left the base. In front of the main doors he came out from a storage closet and was already surrounded when Mission arrived. The three hurled their accusations at him like stones, and he whined more than he spoke, but did not try to tell his story. While one Wookiee grabbed him by the fur of his neck, another told a third to notify "our friends on the ships".

Instead of going to a comm this one marched out the door, and Mission followed. He reached the _Hawk _first and pounded on the side of the open hatch. Mission slipped inside, and headed for the dormitory so that it would look like she had been there the entire time. She heard Gwen answer the Wookiee's request to come in.

When Mission returned, visible, Gwen was saying, "We won't leave you in danger."

Carth entered the corridor. "What's going on?"

Mission touched Gwen's arm so that she knew the Twi'lek had returned and succeeded. The Jedi said, "One of the Rebels told Boba Fett that we're here."

"Escape!" the Wookiee roared. "The bounty hunter wants you, not us. And even if they know where we are now, Imperials have done almost all they can do to us. Our Rebel group will reform, even if its members are killed."

Gwen looked pensive. "You are noble, and strong."

Mission translated from Shriiwook for Carth's benefit, as well as for that of the others who were joining them. "He says we don't need to stay around out of wanting to help. His group will be fine even if the Imperials retaliate, and we can draw Fett off."

"Do all of your team agree to this?" Carth asked the Wookiee, looking concerned.

He nodded. Indeed, others were coming out from the base. Charyyk was not among them. They stood at the base of the ramp, and one shouted "Are your ships ready to fly?"

Mission hurriedly passed the question on to Carth.

"I'll ask Han," he replied, and jogged away toward the cockpit. Gwen watched him go with a look of concern similar to his.

Then her attention turned to outside the ship as an explosion seemed to tear through the air. Mission bounded partway down the ramp at Gwen's side to see what had happened.

The main door was blown off its hinges. The tan-furred Chatyyk burst out of the cloud of smoke—his claws were extended. Sparks made glints of silver off of the bone-white hooks as he turned, and Mission wondered with a flash of disgust if she were about to witness him break the barrier between civilized Wookiee and berserk seven-foot animal.

But apparently, something had woken up Lisk. She leapt up behind Chatyyk and plunged a dart into his neck, then ducked, narrowly avoiding a slowing slash from his claws. He staggered, and finally not so much collapsed as sat down in the dirt, looking around in confusion.

"We have things under control," said the Wookiee who stood at the top of the ramp.

**The **_**Hawk **_**and **_**Falcon **_blasted off a few minutes later, and flew below the atmosphere again for a time to keep Imperial eyes from the Wookiee base as much as possible. Han nervously scanned the tracking screen for the _Slave I_.

"Looks like Fett's on the other side of the planet," he said to his crew, who were gathered in the cockpit. "We might actually have a chance for a clean escape. But I don't think we should go to Dagobah. The _Falcon _can fly, yes…set down in a swamp with that plate loose, I don't know."

"That's true," said Luke. "I never saw a patch of ground big enough for the _Falcon _when I was there. Not to mention the _Ebon Hawk._"

"That's right. So…I've got a nice little hideout on a world called Manna Sanders. We'll stay there. It really is a nice place…less seedy than my usual."

"Fine," said Leia. "We'll go there."

Han told Carth the new coordinates. As the Republic pilot punched them in, he could hear HK-47 talking in the common room, perhaps to himself.

"Woeful statement: My high-tech weapons, blast it all, have been left behind on that forested world!"

**Just before hyperspace **dimpled the fabric of reality, Boba Fett depressed a button on the console in front of him. Numbers scrolled across the screen of his navicomputer, calculating, tracing the space-time continuum with fingers of technology to find out where the _Millennium Falcon _was going. It would only be a general location; he would have to listen to the rumors on a few planets to find his quarry.

However, Boba Fett had a reputation to keep. He was the best bounty hunter in the galaxy. Skywalker and Solo could not escape him thrice.


	13. Darth Vader's Problems

XIII

Darth Vader looked out at the emerald bauble that was Kashyyyk, the blackness flecked with stars, and the one swiftly moving point of light.

He might have noticed the irony in Fett working closely with an ex-Jedi, but it was not in Anakin Skywalker's nature to be keenly interested in coincidences. Perhaps much would have been different if it had been. He thought about the present instead of ironies based in the past. Right now, the present offered more than enough for him to think about.

One of Darth Vader's current problems went by the name Prince Xizor. That criminal Falleen was amassing too much power, due to the success of the organization he lead, Black Sun, and due to—what rankled Vader more—the favor of the emperor. Striking Xizor directly would not kill Black Sun, nor would it appease Vader's personal and rather twisted sense of justice. The Dark Lord wanted to see Xizor know, subtly and cruelly, that Vader had orchestrated his downfall.

As Vader stood still on the bridge of a Star Destroyer, feeling the metal bones of his legs rest locked in place, a communications officer spoke up from the workstations below.

"Lord Vader, a message has arrived from the bounty hunter."

Vader looked back over his shoulder. "Relay it."

"The two Rebel ships have left from the far side of Kashyyyk and went, er, into hyperspace, my lord. The bounty hunter is calculating their vector now. He detected them before we did." His voice lowered. "That isn't legal."

Vader marched over to stand near the officer, his boots at the level of his subordinate's face. "That is of no concern to me right now. He is proving more useful than you." In the Force, fear washed over Vader from the officer; the Sith barely gave it a thought. It was so normal among the nervous men he always served with. They were, he knew, only nervous because of his presence, and so he fed that fear to his considerable ego. Nonetheless, he wasn't going to choke this officer today. He continued to speak. "Tell Fett to keep me informed of Skywalker's progress. But we're moving off of their trail today."

He swept out of the bridge, into the silver hallway and then the turbolift beyond. He would issue the Star Destroyer's new destination in a matter of minutes, when he was sure it was an acceptable one. Curiosity quickened his steps. He had not felt such compulsion in a long time.

That curiosity stemmed from one simple, intriguing fact, as curiosity often does.

One of Darth Vader's current problems went by the name Darth Revan.

Vader was in no way ignorant of Sith history; his Master had insisted he learn it, and along with the names that came before him he had learned how to apply their lives and wars to his own. Ajunta Pall, Exar Kun, Darth Bane…Darth Revan.

_Revan_ had been the name the Jedi woman called on Kashyyyk, while Vader, who had come far too late to rally the meager Imperial troops there and was now simply in the mood to intimidate someone, awaited Fett's capture of Luke and rather idly insulted said Jedi woman. He could remember also seeing and noting the one she called to—she put out the most powerful Force energy in the area.

Was it really possible that Revan had time-traveled into the future and brought along the new Jedi presences Vader had so acutely felt? He had never heard of such a power before. Perhaps Sidious had _kept _it from him. He wanted to dedicate more thought than he could spare at the moment to thinking of how such power could work to his own advantage…but for now, he kept those thoughts reined in.

Vader's destination was a room near to his meditation chamber. The computer within contained a communications channel linked to Sidious, as well as treatises on battle strategy—the room might be called Vader's study. The computer also contained data downloaded to it from one of Sidious' own holocrons. When the Dark Lord entered the term _Darth Revan _into its search program, an encyclopedic article appeared, beginning with an image of a humanoid standing in front of a stone building, its identity obscured by a large black cloak, loose purple and black clothing, and a black mask. Vader examined the mask intently for a moment; he could tell that it was cosmetic, not functional like his own.

The data began with a brief overview of Revan's history. Vader read, _Darth Revan and his apprentice, Darth Malak, began their journey toward conquering the galaxy in an unexpected place: the service of the Republic. Both were Jedi in the time of the Mandalorian Wars, and although the Republic battled the Mandalorians, the Jedi Council decreed that no one from the Order would participate._

_Along with other Malak and other Jedi, Revan rebelled against the Council and joined the war. His forces turned the tide, but after the Mandalorians were defeated, Revan did not stop there. He and Malak formed a new Sith Order comprised of both Force users and common soldiers, and subjugated the galaxy. Revan utilized a machine called the Star Forge, a floating factory built by ancient Rakatan technology, to equip his army. _

_Revan was defeated by the Jedi a few years after his conquest, or so it seemed. In fact he reappeared later in the company of his former enemies, with no memory of who he had been. He traveled around the galaxy undoing his own work, tracking his old self, rediscovering his identity along the way—and eventually destroying the Star Forge and killing Darth Malak, enabling the Republic to return to power._

_ After this, Revan truly disappears from history. It is known, from records the Jedi kept of Revan's comrade's testimonies, that Revan's original purpose in forging the Sith regime was to stave off a rumored group called Old Sith or Outsiders, who reputedly dwelled outside known space and were powerful enough to destroy the Republic. Whether this organization actually existed is uncertain; recent historians suspect that the Old Sith were in fact the Chiss._

Other areas in the article highlighted what had been recorded of Revan's Force powers, but nowhere was time travel mentioned. Enough secrecy and ancient devices _were_ mentioned, though, that Vader knew he could not discount the possibility. Multiple starships were mentioned as belonging to Revan in the war, but one—the _Ebon _Hawk—caught Vader's eye. Its image captured by a security cam on Manaan just as it had been by a Star Destroyer today. No special powers were attributed to it, and Vader suspected that that meant it had belonged to Revan after the war.

He sat back in the chair in front of the desk, digesting the information. His first thought was that he needed to get more information from Lord Sidious. There would be no way to keep the new Jedi's existence a secret; probably, the Sith Master already knew. He would weave them into his webs of influence, and Vader would have to go along with it.

His second thought was that it was rather refreshing to read an old text that didn't have a pro-Sith spin on it.

His third thought was that history had gotten Revan's gender wrong.

Then he keyed in the command which would request an audience with the emperor. Sidious considered any of Vader's reports related to the Jedi more important than any of his duties as leader of the Empire, however, he was sometimes not near the holoprojector, or not in the mood to be spoken to. Nevertheless, Vader kept his eyes directed at the floor.

However, Sidious immediately appeared before him as a hologram, face hooded. "Why have you summoned me, Lord Vader?"

"Master, in my last report about Skywalker I told that he was in the company of Solo as well as a second ship which we could not identify. I believe it has been identified…as the _Ebon Hawk_, which belonged to Darth Revan. I have also seen Revan herself."

"Himself?" Palpatine's lined face twisted in confusion.

"The stormtroopers at the garrison where this occurred were not available to transmit their security cam's records, and I did not do so myself to delay reporting to you, but I am reasonably certain that Revan is female. And present, with Skywalker and other Jedi."

The emperor's expression of confusion mixed with musing deepened, but when he spoke it was with certainty, and undertones of secrecy. "I would find this tale ludicrous…had I not sensed these Jedi who do not go quietly into oblivion. Do you have _proof_ that one of them is Revan reborn?"

"Only her name, and her ship. But I do not think she was resurrected, Master."

Musing now, no confusion. "Time travel."

"Is it possible?" Vader hesitantly asked.

"It is. A strange power…I would not call it _dark, _although because of its power and potential danger, often those of the dark take it.

I must study this further. The only records of it which exist are in my possession. Let Revan go. I sense…much power, just like that attributed to the Dark Lord of history.

Skywalker will be found, Lord Vader. If he is not, I will be very displeased." The hologram flickered off. Vader was left alone with his unstoppable, sighing breaths, rage simmering beneath his iron will.

One of Darth Vader's current problems went by the name Luke Skywalker.

Vader's mental shields were strong and subtle—they needed to be; if he barely thought about them, Sidious would know their contents.

The plan had not gone well on Bespin. Its success required two things—that Luke be, if not loyal to, connected in some way to Vader. It also required Luke joining the dark side. Then they could indeed rule the galaxy as father and son, killing and taking over from Vader's Master just as Sith tradition decreed.

Now Luke knew of the connection by blood, and of the power of the dark side, but, for some reason, continued to cling to the light. It truly pained Vader that his son would reject him, would choose to fall to an unknown fate instead of allying with him. But to accept that pain was weakness. It reminded him of the time before the crucible called Mustafar.

Which brought back the subject of time travel. To have such power…Vader paced across the room and clenched his thick-gloved fists, because no power could make him Anakin Skywalker again. It would not return to him his body, his wife, his innocence. It would not grant him the heart-wrenchingly painful, heart-wrenchingly desirable his side and her fate again.

But it could still offer him a gift. Perhaps Revan, or one of the other Jedi she had brought with her, could be turned to the dark side. Vader forced himself to think, _Luke could be killed. Another, stronger new apprentice could serve in his place. _


	14. Port Kor'T'Ka

XIV

It was hard to find privacy on the _Falcon _or the _Hawk_, but because of the recent fight and flight everyone was too tired to get in the usual small arguments with each other. Finally they were reasonably sure that they weren't going to be double-crossed, attacked, or interdicted, and so the crews reacted to adventure in the ways they knew would prepare them for a new one. They slept, ate, and didn't do much else if it wasn't absolutely necessary.

The descent to Manna Sanders was smooth. "Welcome to Port Kor't'ka," Han announced over the commas the two ships soared low over waterfront docks. Speeders adapted for travel over water floated beside the ridged spines of submersibles between the jetties. In the _Hawk_'s cockpit, Gwen watched as the docks, a grassy park, and identical office buildings that surrounded the town square on three sides passed below the ship. They set down at the docking bays in the center of a middle-class residential area inland from the identical, white buildings.

When both ships had settled, Han said, "We should be safe here. This world isn't independent, but the Empire can't watch every island nation it's got. I need to go out to get some supplies now, so…"

Gwen placed one hand lightly on Carth's shoulder. "I'm going to gather our Jedi together."

**She sat cross-legged **on the decking of the swoop bay, her dark eyes closed. The light of the Force shone from the people meditating in front of her, and through it, she could see.

Mical knelt in a pool of bright light; Bao-Dur burned with a steady glow like an undousable candle. Anna's thoughts were tangled, her Force powers buried under her uncertainty. Luke Skywalker leaked power like an engine leaking coolant, steady drips of brilliance channeled only by thin walls of discipline and teachings.

Revan looked at herself, and saw aquamarine depths like an equatorial sea. The fanged firaxa lived there, as well as beautiful fronds, but all the dark rifts had been explored and given the light—Darth Malak's slashes on her soul had healed.

Anna still worried her a bit; no strong Master-apprentice bond had formed between her and her companions. Anna still had to recover from her epic struggle—Gwen knew full well that one didn't want to have to think enough to maintain even friendship after one of those. Gwen would offer to train Mical or Bao-Dur herself, but she felt that the three could be a very powerful team, as they had been before hormones kicked in in the wake of adrenaline.

Besides, Revan thought she might focus on working with Luke. Whatever his version of the unmasking of Revan had been, she felt that it had linked them from the moment she first saw him. He needed a teacher who knew how to control vast tracts of power, which, all pride aside, Gwen did.

The meditation had forged the five Jedi into a linked chain; Gwen gently prompted them out of that peaceful state. "Luke," she said softly.

"Master Bolwyn?" he replied, almost shyly. He had seated himself at a distance from the other three; Gwen noted that he was rather in awe of the other Jedi and uncertain of what they might do.

"With all due respect…please tell me what you know of the Jedi who came before you, especially how they were killed."

"I don't know much about it. The Empire hides information like that. All the propaganda says that the Jedi were wizards with too much power to be good for a unified government. They were all killed, except Ben and Yoda."

"Mass murder and suppression of information. Pleasant. But your Masters survived. What did they teach you? I'd like to compare methods."

"It was a lot of physical work; running, fighting. The Force too. I learned the difference between light and dark. 'Do or do not, there is no try'." He smiled slightly.

"Okay. I've seen you deflect blasterbolts, so I know you're a bit skilled with a lightsaber. That's good; I think we're going to need it. I'll talk a bit about philosophy now, and we can try and beat each other a little later."

**Han and Leia **walked along a crowded street. Stores catering to tourists sat alongside practical ones for the citizens and the fishing industry of the port city. Duros had colonized this world first, but it had many resources—other species or organizations had followed. Leia could partially see Threepio and Artoo along with Mission and the Wookiees, window shopping on the other side of the street. She had a feeling Chewie would come to join her and Han soon. This pleasant planet was not his comfort zone.

But it was Artoo who came whirring and beeping across the street around the legs of the crowd. He scooted a few steps ahead of Leia and Han just as two people came out of the mouth of an alley where he stopped, a bulky transceiver in one of their hands.

Recognizing Wedge Antilles, Rebel pilot extraordinaire, Leia smiled and ducked into the alley, Han and Artoo following closely. Wedge clasped her hand; behind him, a Sullustan man, dressed like him in a plain brown tunic, smiled.

"I would've called," said dark-haired Wedge, "but your message sounded urgent."

"You sent a distress call?" Han asked Leia.

"I did. We're alright now, Wedge," she said calmly. "Han has a bounty on his head, and the Empire found us a couple times. We just need to lay low. But we can't. Luke's on a mission. We're helping him help people…but it helps him too." She had not even realized that she was thinking this way before; that Luke needed Gwen's crew like Leia needed Han; as a family, a new history. His planet had not been destroyed, but he had never identified with Tatooine; the Jedi were his culture, and the chance for him to get to know them was something Leia wanted to keep, for his sake, as long as she could. The same sort of love set her firmly against asking Wedge to use Rogue Squadron to attract attention away from the _Falcon_. Now was not the time for a strike against the Empire. Palpatine himself was too safe, and the Rebellion too depleted. The next big mission, like most of them, was going to be desperate.

"If you say so," replied Wedge. "Princess, High Command almost considers you, Han, Luke, and Chewie a fleet by now. They'll trust you with anything. But as a very small fleet…you're not always given missions." He gave a wry, thin-lipped smile.

"We've been moving around so much. I'm afraid keeping track of us…isn't efficient. Tell Command I'm busy, Wedge. They owe me that by now." She felt serious now, defiant of his blasé manner. It was _true _that she had put in more hours in active duty with the Alliance than many soldiers had, never resting because she had no home to go to, and while this wasn't rest, it was personal.

He picked up her seriousness. "If they ask…is your mission helping the cause?"

She looked him in the eye, summoned authority to her voice, and said "I think so."

He backed off, shrugged. "Alright. May the Force be with you."

"Thank you. I'm sorry to pull you out of your way."

"No problem. We were on our way past to Arkania and got ready to come in here guns blazing, princess." He saluted her casually, which she took as a compliment; he was comfortable with her.

"May the Force be with you," she said softly, Han waved, and Wedge and his wingmate walked through the alley the way they had come to return to their ships. Han put an arm around her after a moment; she realized she had been frightened that her idea had been wrong, that Wedge would try to call her back to High Command. "Helping the Jedi is really important to me, Han, because they're helping Luke. Even if they're going to leave, this time is important. I should have told you I called Command."

He said, his mouth against her ear, "Before they go, we've got the two men who blew up Death Stars in one city. Is there anything we need demolished, sweetheart?"

**Waves lapped at **the sandy shore, their gently rounded crests touched with the orange light of the setting suns. Enough daylight remained that she could see Admiral Onasi running along the shore in the middle distance, and the long-billed black birds flocking toward the land. She could see Mical sitting beside her on the low rock wall that separated a small section of the water from the sand, and could sense his soft presence in her head like a bird against her shoulder. Lukewarm, saline-scented water lapped against her bare feet.

Her disciple's serenity segued into nervousness for a moment. Days that felt like minutes ago, she had set her hand over his and simply not felt the instinctive desire to pull it away that most people felt when mistakenly touching another. She was _comfortable _with him. And there had been attraction, when first they met. Because she remembered him. And through his eyes the Jedi were Knights, the Force was campfire-tale magic, life was dangerous and epic and beautiful. He saw bloodshed and was innocent, because it was Story. Life was to be written down, made into history, into poetry.

He saw the ocean as beautiful. And so she acted as Devaronian's Advocate and forcibly turned the Force nexus in on itself; she saw through his eyes. And so the ocean was beautiful. Against it to her he was beautiful; in profile his face looked more stern than it sometimes did, his eyes, soft sometimes to the point of weakness, glinted in profile, blue stars above his closed lips and the defined line of his jaw.

"This is perfect," she said. She scooped up a handful of sand and sifted it between her fingers, individual grains massaging the sensitive skin of her palm. "I wish I could keep it, could take a picture."

"Nothing lasts forever." He said, but then he smiled and looked at her almost shyly, amusement in the Force. "But things it feels like you've wanted forever and never had, they finally constrain themselves to time…"

He leaned forward, touched her cheek with his fingertips. She caught his hand and pressed his palm against her skin, drawing him closer, constraining them to time.


	15. A Death and A Vision

_A/N: The dialogue in this chapter which was taken from _Return of the Jedi _is_ _courtesy of Lucasfilm and James Kahn. I really didn't want to directly rewrite so much, but it was important…_

XV

A few days were spent on Manna Sanders fixing the ships, sealing plates and topping off fuel and rechecking old break points. Then need urged them onward, and a few uneventful weeks later the _Falcon _settled onto the swampy ground in front of Yoda's hut. Insects slid across the water to escape the sinking metal struts of its legs.

Han stood up from the pilot's seat, still leaning over and focused on the controls. "The _Hawk _landed a clearing away, so we'll see them in a sec. If my ship _rusts_…Luke! The door's open."

The young Jedi was standing at the bulkhead to the central corridor, looking out at the vine-draped forest he had never seen through this viewport. "Thanks," he said. "Ah, I'd like to see Master Yoda alone, Han. I...have a bad feeling about this. Not a dangerous feeling. Just…"

Han noted his distracted look, but simply nodded as Luke trailed off, unsure how to articulate the words the Force spoke. Luke walked away from the cockpit, boots clattering on the decking. The ramp was indeed down, and he jogged across the mossy ground toward the hut, forgetting about the Force's small cries as he thought about what he was going to say to his old Master. His steps slowed, curiosity and enthusiasm giving way to memory… memories of Vader, and realizations of what knowledge Yoda could impart, now that Luke knew the right questions to ask.

Or maybe the right question had always been '_How can I tell the good side from the bad?'_

He almost dragged his feet as he ducked under the low lintel of Yoda's door, as if Vader were physically present and pulling him away.

Yoda sat on his low couch in the dim interior, a blanket drawn up around his waist; he looked like a puppet, like a frayed stuffed animal, when Luke first saw him. Then his eyes lit up with a smile. "Look so old do I," he said, "to young eyes?"

Gently Luke moved; as if touching glass; he held the blanket up and then tucked it against his Master's thin neck as Yoda turned and lay down, belying his blithe words. Luke spoke softly, matching the quietude of the moment which, he felt, might break just like glass. "No, Master, of course not."

Yoda chuckled. "Soon I will rest. Yes, forever sleep."

Luke was calm, somehow, because of the Force, or the earthy smell, or the memories that were somehow worse than the present. He could say, "But you can't die, Master Yoda," calmly, and mean he had never thought of his Master as mortal.

"Strong with the Force are you…but not that strong. Twilight is upon me. Soon, night must fall." Yoda's gravelly voice wavered.

"But, but I need your help. I need to complete my training." The glass was in the back of Luke's head, beginning to crack the quietude—

"No more training do you require." Yoda sounded infinitely certain, but spoke quietly enough that Luke bent to best hear him. "Already know that which you need."

Even thrill was quieted into awe. "Then I am a Jedi," Luke breathed.

""Not yet! One thing remains." Yoda's hands shifted beneath the blanket. "Vader. You must confront _Vader_. And confront him you will."

Silence. Quietude. Calm. Glass piecing itself back together. "Master Yoda…is Darth Vader my father?"

Yoda's small hands fluffed the blanket. "Rest, I need. Yes, rest."

Again Luke felt the defiance that he had on the first day he met Yoda. His Master was a trickster. "Yoda, I must know."

"Your father he is."

Luke sat back, willing the solidarity of the walls to banish his sudden vertigo.

"Told you, he did."

Luke nodded. "Yes," slipped from his parted lips.

"Unexpected this is. And unfortunate."

That surprised Luke. "Unfortunate, that I know the truth?"

"Unfortunate that you rushed to face him—that _incomplete_ was your training. Not ready for the _burden _were you."

And Luke felt that burden acutely. It was a bitterness, it was a depth, a mystic cynicism that set him apart from others…and that he would cultivate, from this day forth. He knew the future. He knew who he was, and how integral his sadness.

**Anna Sacul brushed **a cluster of leaves away from her head and came away with a red smear, like blood, on her hand. A second later Mical pushed the leaves aside for her and she continued on ahead of him down a leaf-strewn path, her feet uncomfortably wet from the swamp she had slipped into as she clambered onto this island via vines rising up and hunching down out of the green-white water.

"This is not the right way, Anna," Mical said. He paused before he spoke her name, as if tasting the unspoken title he had dropped—she knew _she_ was. For him to be comfortable enough not to call her "Master" in private felt like an accomplishment to her, as if a barrier between them had been torn away.

"I know, Mical. But can't you feel it—the Force is strong in this direction."

"Strong in the dark side."

"Revan gave us permission to go." Anna clambered over a stump, the half-skirt of her navy blue armor swishing around her legs with the movement. Mical sighed, and waited a moment until she had gone over and he could follow her.

Beneath the roots of a thick-trunked tree in front of them, the ground dropped away into a dark pit that Anna thought might be the entrance to a cave. Indeed it _felt _as if it had hidden pits and hallways—she could feel the architecture of the underground structure almost as acutely as if she held a map, because the cave was awash with the Force; with the dark side, which filled it like poisoned blood in the planet's veins.

Mical stood beside her, his feet firmly on the ground as hers were, and said, "I don't think we should do this."

"I need to know." She said. She stepped forward. Cold air prickled at her arms. "This called me. You can stay here."

He started to nod, to agree, then clenched his jaw. "No. I will not allow you to walk into danger alone."

She turned and put her hands on his shoulders. "I know you want to protect me. But this is _mine_."

He nodded, eyes wide, and she sensed that she had scared him with her intensity. But because he was Mical he firmed his resolve with that fear, and stepped back, arms crossed, to watch her walk into the darkness.

Walk she did. Leaves slipped under her feet as the shadow of the tree enveloped her. She followed the tumbling leaves down the initial steep slope beneath the tree, the cold continuing to deepen, her boots sinking into unidentifiable loam. Grotesque roots ribbed the passage, snakes squirming between their curves, pausing to hiss at the human intruder. Spurred by the feeling of danger all around, Anna pulled her lightsaber from her belt and activated one blue blade.

Never emerging from the background feeling of danger, snaking under her guard before she knew to act, a hand took her by the throat, cut her off from the air, and slammed her back against a dirt wall.

--Darth Sion. With unstoppable strength in his decaying limbs the Sith Lord Anna had already slain—a few times, before he surrendered himself to the Force—scraped her back against the dirt and pivoted. He threw her across the passageway, silently, cracked muscles bunching and filling up her field of vision before she landed on her feet, lightsaber held horizontally before her, meters away from her foe. Sion advanced. His own red lightsaber screamed from his hand—She sidestepped the way she had come and stabbed toward his chest.

His riposte was impossibly slow. She stabbed him just below the ribs, her blade sinking almost to the hilt in his hide before she pulled her arm back. None of the sense of danger in the cave died, but Darth Sion collapsed. Steam rose from his body where his saber-arm fell across his chest. The next movement she made was a misstep; slipping in the loam and confused by the spirals of smoke, she fell to her knees beside Darth Sion. The smoke, scentless, sourceless, wreathed him to the neck, and then she blinked, and saw that his face was hers.

White skin cracked and welling blood, tufts of hair fallen across an eye half closed, half milky white, the dead Exile looked up at herself.

Then the apparition faded and Anna flinched away and to her feet, still feeling Darth Sion's clammy hands around her throat. She stared at where her foe had lain, at where…

The compulsion to enter the cave was gone.

…at where a vision had definitely tried to impart her _some _knowledge. But did it mean that she was fighting herself, or that Darth Sion had never surrendered as she had thought, or that she was evil? She remembered, as she had avoided remembering for nowhere near long enough, the Sith's voice bitterly intoning, "You are beautiful to me."

She shook her head, and looked around at the cave. The smoke was gone. The grotto had become entirely mundane.

She turned to go, and suddenly it felt like there were eyes at her back.

She ran. She grasped roots to easily pull herself up out of the cave and into the green-tinted sunlight. She could only breathe easily once she threw herself into Mical's arms and he backed away, taking her hands tightly in her own to remind her of whom and what she was.

"Anna. What's wrong, Anna?"

**Revan looked up **as Luke approached the patch of high ground where she sat in front of a glowing space heater. The Force clung to him as if he had just come from a meditation session, although it was also tainted with the sadness which came with experience. No one can tell for certain from someone's walk or gaze whether theirs is the soul or body of a fighter, but something of the rank Jedi Master is carried on the countenance, and Revan saw that mark beginning to show in the eyes of Luke. He passed his gaze over those who had assembled outside the hut—Revan, Carth, Mission, HK-47,Bao-Dur, R2-D2,and Han; his eyes lingered on Leia—and crouched down across from the Zabrak, eyes downcast.

Luke said, "Master Yoda is dead. I couldn't find the information you want. There wasn't time."

"Aw," said Mission. "That's rough."

"I'm sorry," said Gwen. "Oh," she turned slightly around on the rock she had taken as her seat, and there was a suspenseful moment in which Carth put one hand on her arm and one on his blaster and said "What?" before Anna and Mical appeared from the woods. The Exile's armor was battered, with the occasional leaf stuck to a metal piece, and Mical held on to the crook of her elbow.

"She saw some kind of vision," Mical immediately explained, breathing heavily as if from a run, "In a cave some distance from here."

"The cave?" Luke breathed.

"You know the place?" Gwen did not turn around to look at him as she stood up to give the Exile her albeit uncomfortable seat.

"It's a focus of the dark side," he continued.

"She says she saw Darth Sion," said Mical, kneeling before Anna and looking imploringly up at Gwen, as if Anna's experience were a text he could not read. "Does that signify something?"

"I don't know," said Gwen. "I didn't know him." She put a hand on Anna's head and began to Force heal her, Carth looking on.

Anna raised her hand and waved Gwen's away; "I'm alright," she said, "Really." She turned to look at Luke. "You said this is normal for that cave?"

"Ah, yeah,"

"It's just a vision. I'm alright. Did you find anything out about the stone?"

"No," said Gwen. Carth offered her his seat and she took it, settling her Jedi robes around her legs; she had changed her form-fitting red outfit for Masterly robes today. Carth glanced at the assassin droid next to him and folded his arms.

"Hk-47 and I were actually talking about our situation a time ago," Mical said. "About time travel, and about what would happen if we, ah, took something from this time back."

Gwen delved into thought. In the days when she had known herself as Darth Revan she had unearthed many a cryptic secret and placed it back into its dusty receptacle to rot, were it not a weapon or a dissertation on the Force. Had anything appeared about time travel? She wracked her memory banks…

And remembered the unruly computer on Dantooine.

A small gasp drew the attention of the group to her. "What is it?" Luke asked.

"I remember. A Rakatan computer, on Dantooine. I needed to use two of them, to open the doors to the Star Map I was looking for. The computers asked questions, as a sort of security system, and one of them…asked a different question. I don't remember what it was exactly, but the others had all asked about planets, and this one…was about _time_. I was given the option to bypass it, and did. I—we, I mean, Darth Malak and I—knew that only the questions about planets mattered to the door. Maybe, if we answer that question…"

Carth finished her sentence as she paused. "We'll know what happened to us." For some reason she sensed some trepidation from him; she made a mental note to ask him about it later.

"Then, we should just go back to Dantooine," said Mical.

Gwen nodded. "We could do that."

Luke said, "Sounds good."

"Princess Leia," Gwen said. "I don't want to take your Jedi from you if you have your own tasks to complete, which I imagine you do, being that you're in a war."

Leia paused for a moment, her thin hand on Han's rugged one; he began to speak, but quieted when she did. "He has done much for us." She looked at Luke. "It's time we do something for him. Luke," she said kindly. "It's up to you whether we go with them."

"I could go on the _Hawk_," he said with a shrug as if he would not prefer it; Han, though, cut him off.

"You're not getting pulled into the weird time-travel stuff they're talking about. If that ship goes into a singularity…You're handy, kid, and I'd prefer if you weren't on it."

"Thanks."

"Eh," Han turned to look at Leia rather sheepishly.

"We're with you, then," Leia told Gwen.

"Excellent." Mical smiled. "The quest can begin again, with a new purpose."

Han got up, stretched, and picked up the handle of the space heater. "I'll put this back in the ship then."

"Right," said Leia, and followed him as he almost knocked over Mission's seat with the space heater on the way to the _Falcon_.

Mical looked down at Anna, then crouched to look her in the eye. "If these people had any poetic sense," he said to her with a smile, "What I said would've been the last word of the conversation."

"I'm sorry that life doesn't fit your sensibilities," she said, and brushed a leaf off of the shoulder of his white tunic.

Nearer the hut, Gwen stopped her walk toward the path to the _Hawk _and caught Carth's eye. "Did you want to say something?"

"I did." He stopped and leaned against a boulder next to the hut. " About after we go back. I never imagined that I would find you, and then get into _this _adventureI'm an Admiral now. We can…settle down." A smile quirked the corner of his mouth. "If you want that?"

"Carth, what else would I want?"  
"To be a Jedi Master. To go to Anna's Academy and teach little ones."

"Well maybe there'll be some of that too." She had never pictured such a future; her peaceful time in the Outer Rim had been deprived of Carth, and now, she tended to focus on the next day. They might be attacked, be killed, at any time. But afterward…now she imagined children running in a garden of grass and paved stone. Dark-haired and brown-eyed children, opening flower petals with the Force. She looked up at her former co-pilot, smiling. "Maybe some of the little ones, though, will want to fly spaceships or talk to diplomats instead of use the Force. Maybe they won't be able to use it. But, you know, I'll love them…so much." She set a hand against the boulder and kissed him, trying to convey her tender feelings for a potential future—but almost before she closed her eyes Carth turned away and pointed with the hand that was not around her waist. Mical and the Exile were walking toward them, his head down and her thoughts wondering. They stopped a meter away, hands clasped in front of them like those of respectful Padawans who had intruded on a private moment.

Which they had. Gwen, though, managed to consider their behavior cute, and asked, "What's on your mind?"

"I need to ask—is there anything you, er, weren't telling the group about my vision?"

Gwen indicated that the four of them should walk toward the _Ebon Hawk_. "No. I'm sorry. I really don't know. I had visions indicating my past life, but none as surreal as what you describe."

Anna took her time to answer, as all of them needed to focus on their feet on the wet and rocky ground. "Maybe it was nothing. Like Luke said. It's that cave's job to be creepy. It's just a vision."

They paused at the entrance to the Hawk. Gwen said what she felt she had to, although it was not the kind thing. "Are you sure there's such a thing as 'just a vision'?"

As she entered the ship, her back to them all, Anna replied, "No."


	16. The Rakatan Scientists' Prophecy

XVI

Bao-Dur smashed his orange lightsaber blade so hard onto Revan's that Luke's hands bucked around the borrowed hilt. Luke grimaced with a quick flash of teeth; he stepped backward, angling the buzzing green blade to block more completely. Bao-Dur stabbed for his collarbone.

"Ha!" Revan cried out wordlessly, happily, from the sidelines.

"He got you!" Mission crowed from her seat on the workbench.

Luke backed off, but only turned off his weapon when the big Zabrak did. Bao-Dur bowed his head in a brief nod.

"Hold on, they're not done yet." Revan walked into the middle of the room from her place beside Carth, forestalling the next combatants, Anna and Mical, from moving into the middle of the floor. "You're to straightforward." She said to Luke. "'Saber fighting is like dance. You move well. Now you need to know how to get out of reach of your opponent's blade. Move in directions he won't expect. Around, out of his field of vision."

Luke and Bao-Dur faced off again and this time as soon as Revan clapped for them to begin Luke sidestepped his foe's attack, feinted, stepped again toward the Zabrak's shoulder, and slashed.

"Good!" said Gwen. "That was much better."

"Ah, hey, Bao-Dur?" asked Mission.

"Hmm?"  
"Could your energy arm stop a lightsaber blade?"

"I don't know." For a second, Bao-Dur looked down at the glowing current which had replaced his elbow and forearm. "I do not plan on finding out."

They fought a few more bouts. Each time, Luke improved. Finally Gwen said, "You do move well. You're…a good apprentice. You can sit down."

"Thank you." Luke bowed his head to Gwen and left the swoop hanger as Anna and Mical took the floor. He flopped down against a bench set against the wall in the hallway, hands red from the beatings he had taken. Thoughts from before he left Dagobah came crowding back.

Ben Kenobi had appeared to him after Yoda's passing, fulfilling the unspoken promise of his appearance on Hoth only after Luke had resigned himself to melancholy.

_He walked vaguely in the direction of his traveling companions' camp, feeling separated from Han, Leia, and R2 by Yoda's death and his own Jedi powers, and from Anna and company because of how casually they held their power. Jedi, he had been told, lived together in an enclave and did not have families, children, or parents. How could they understand Luke's loneliness? _

_Then came the voice, as solid and frighteningly surreal as Ben Kenobi's transparent blue spirit-body, which stepped out from behind a stand of trees a moment later. The old Jedi said, "Yoda will be with you always."_

_"Ben!" Luke cried. But his enthusiasm faded when the old man's visage reminded him of the hovel on Tatooine, and the stories of Anakin…"Why didn't you tell me?"_

_"I was going to tell you when you completed your training. But you found it necessary to rush off unprepared."_

_"You told me Darth Vader betrayed and murdered my father!"_

_Ben spoke of Anakin's fall, of Ben's own faults which led in part to it. Luke accused; Ben consoled, and talked of humbleness. He said, "There is still good in him." Luke remembered this clearly. He also remembered, "You are ready for your final confrontation."_

_"Am I? There are all these other Jedi—Gwen! She'd do better against Vader than I would."_

_"But you can _save _him, Luke." No more frenzy in Ben's voice, only serenity."Revan, or any of her students, came into your life for a reason, but she and her friends are only an offshoot of your destiny. I feel that it is you who must pull the old light out from under the shadow in which Vader cloaks himself."_

_Luke sighed. "I can't do it, Ben."_

_His mentor would not console any more. "Then the emperor has already won."_

_"Yoda spoke of another." Luke grasped at hope._

_"The other he spoke of is your twin sister."_

_"But I have no sister."_

_"To protect you both from the Emperor, you were hidden from your father when you were born. The Emperor knew, as I did, if Anakin were to have any offspring, they would be a threat to him. That is the reason why your sister remains safely anonymous."_

_But the Force was whispering to Luke, brewing up a name like bubbles rise in hot springs."Leia," he breathed. "Leia's my sister."_

To protect her, Luke would have to keep her identity from her, from Darth Vader, from those he traveled with, and from his own heart. Suddenly he had a family, imbued with the Force, entangled in a galactic drama bigger than anything he had ever imagined. Your sister is a princess. Your father is a Dark Lord and the second most famous man in the galaxy. And what that makes _you…_Luke thought that, before he went off Tatooine, he would have loved the story of his life.

And he could, sometime soon, he felt. He had valued escapism for so long that thinking about his new family as a sort of saga made it easier to deal with. Nothing, though, would make his revelations easier to deal with immediately…or, perhaps, in the next few weeks. All the Jedi on the ship knew he was going through something—how could they not?—but they were polite enough not to ask, and he continued to want to keep them at bay. He still felt distanced from them, by the gap of time there had once been and by the skills and lore he had failed to learn. He understood that Yoda had needed to prioritize his training, to prepare him physically for Vader and the rougher parts of the galaxy instead of telling him about the history of the Jedi, about nonattachment and such precepts. But it still made him feel as if he had only in their presence discovered a second family, a set of ancestors united by power if not by blood, that he had never known about.

Rather glad that he was not in Leia's presence either, wondering if she could feel his emotions now as she had on Bespin, he returned to the swoop hanger to distract himself with the lightsaber fights.

**Dantooine had changed **since the time of Revan. Leia told of abandoned Rebel bases, but there were no smoking ruins, nor remains of Khoonda and the Jedi Temple that Anna knew. In its place was an Imperial research center, which they gave wide berth. Investigations of it might be made, Revan said, if the time was right, but it would not be the group's first priority.

She stood in the cockpit behind Admiral Onasi and Revan, eagerly looking out over the waving grass as the _Ebon Hawk _settled down on an open plain where it was technically not allowed to land at all. Luckily, mindtricks, charisma, and Luke's knowledge of landing codes worked just as well as an official flight path. They had encountered no danger from passing ships, and had flown to avoid the manta-like creatures that still soared through the blue skies as their ancestors had four thousand years ago.

Even though Master Yoda had not been able to explain the phenomena of the stone, Anna felt that something might happen here. She and her companions must have been sent to this time for a reason. The Force was no so sparse as to fling them across such a distance by some sort of accident.

Or would it? The Force is not a deity. It can have no sense of will, of responsibility, although it is synonymous with destiny.

The Force is _life_. It is vitality, sentience, biology.

And life, Anna felt, owes the Exile nothing.

**Their first destination** was the place where Gwen had originally found the Star Map. From the _Hawk_'s records and Gwen's memory she could estimate its location, and so she, Anna, Mical, Han, Leia, and Luke searched through the hills and small plateaus of the Dantooine plains for the underground bunker, where the Star Map and its attendant computers had once resided. The other crewmembers remained with the ships, guarding them from human or animal intruders and watching the comm channels.

The standing stones Anna remembered from her time on Dantooine were still there, many lying on the ground, a few standing up like stylized statues of skeleton keys. Gwen led the group forward, and down through the doors of an ancient bunker. Anna felt a reverence for the scene. The Dark Lord Revan had walked through these doors just as Jedi Master Bolwyn did now, and she was closer in mind than the Galactic Civil War was.

It was musty inside the ancient room. Rust stained the floor. The walls were made of a ribbed, dark stone. The building itself was not imbued with the Force, but Anna was struck with a definite sense of malaise as she moved farther under its shadow. Gwen hastened to an open doorway on the right and positioned herself behind a construct which looked more like an abstract sculpture than a computer; wing-shaped flanges flared out from either side of the central part to which Gwen was attaching her datapad. She scanned the screen and then shook her head and removed the datapad.

She said, "It's the other one."

The room on the opposite side of the first chamber was identical and held an identical machine.

"These computers have been here for four thousand years?" Leia commented, amazed.

"Much longer," said Gwen.

"They don't make them like that anymore," Han quipped.

Mical took an edge of the computer between two of his fingers. "I wonder about the source of this material. It almost looks organic, but it's hard as durasteel…"

"And much more pliable, judging by the shapes of Rakatan architecture." Gwen said absently, as she worked with the computer.

Luke asked, "Rakatan?"

Gwen looked up. "Rakatans were a species, maybe the first to unify people from different planets into an empire. They created the Star Maps and lots of ruins which were turning up during the Mandalorian Wars and the Sith conflict. I found out that they weren't extinct at all, when I went to one of their worlds to find the Star Forge. It's quite possible that they also created this time-travel technology that we stumbled upon."

Anna moved so that she could see the words on the computer's screen. Gwen finished selecting three words from a list of adjectives, and a new question appeared.

WHAT IS TIME?

Three answer options were given: A CAGE, A SKY, or A LANDSCAPE.

Anna fingered the crystal that Bao-Dur had given her, which now resided in a pouch at her waist. She thought that the metaphor the answers were indicating was relatively clear. In a cage, movement is impossible. That couldn't be the answer, because movement through time was exactly what had brought her and her party to this situation. In the sky, movement was effortless with the correct apparatus. Could that be the answer? But then, a landscape…where movement was limited by the laws of physics, but was easier, more natural, for humanoids.

"I think it's this one," Gwen tapped the screen over the word "landscape". "Space-time, it's compared to a flat plane sometimes. Black holes cut through that plane, like how cutting a hole through a piece of paper would make a two dimensional surface have three-dimensional properties."

"You think that what enabled you to travel here was a black hole?" Luke asked.

"No, it wasn't; but maybe that crystal did a similar thing, breaking through the plane of space-time."

Gwen thought for a moment, then selected "landscape".

Anna heard a noise, a sort of whirring, from outside the room. Gwen began to jog into it and turned to enter the room opposite the ruin's entrance, the one where, presumably, the Star Map had once been. A new hologram was floating there now. She could see words but not yet read them. Gwen and Mical cut in front of her on their way to the message, and so her first glimpse of it was between the silhouettes of their backs. The words were in Aurebesh, as those on the computer had been.

Gwen turned aside so Anna could see, her sense serious.

The displayed writing appeared to be a scientific text, beginning in the middle of a sentence.

_"…a question about the nature of Time, the development of the formula reveals that it is less mathematical than prophetic. Metaphysical attributes, as evidenced by the life force, govern the flow of the time-space continuum. I and Taasa have extensively researched the force and science to determine the properties of a moment which may facilitate legitimate time-travel. This moment has been condensed into a power-crystal such as those imbued with the force. Many precautions are taken to ensure that its activation is safe, that science and reality are not bent not to destroy rather to further our explorations._

_One being, a scion of the Infinite Empire or one of its slaves, will arise with the ability to trigger the time-space distortion. He or she will be perceived as a nexus in the force, drawing the folds of destiny and influence around him like a cloak; he will know to seek these words; he will travel to the worlds Duros, Ba-ion, and Iridonia, to find the crystals like that which he has found here. _

_Then the landscape which is time will be opened for him, and he may search and find to make his home whenever and wherever he wishes."_

A silence reigned as the Exile stood back from the message and others took her place reading it; she felt a heavy sense of destiny. Certain that the "nexus in the force" mentioned in the text was herself, she read it again, trying to fix the words within her memory. "Drawing the folds of destiny and influence around him like a cloak"…Duros, Ba-ion, Iridonia. She had never heard of the second one; the third was Bao-Dur's homeworld.

"To make his home wherever he wishes." That phrase produced a pang in Anna; she did not know that she considered anywhere her home, even the _Hawk_, where so much had happened, was more of a refuge, a bunker in wartime, not a safe home or even a piece of property she owned, now that Revan and Carth had returned to it. A home was an appealing concept.

She took the crystal from her pocket and looked at it. She, Gwen, or Bao-Dur had examined it a few times over the course of their journeys, but it appeared in all regards to be unremarkable. Attempts to identify it as a mechanical device failed early; it was simply a solid crystal, not unlike those used in a lightsaber. Now Anna turned it over in her hands and focused on it, rather as one would focus the Force to summon the gatekeeper of a holocron. She sensed nothing unusual, but suddenly an image blossomed out of the crystal's top surface; like a holoprojector it showed an image of a man standing over it, his back to Anna. He whirled around a second later, and breathed her name. Behind him she could see the interior of what appeared to be a starship.

The man was Atton Rand.

"Anna?" He leaned forward, but something was stopping him from getting much closer than he was—she had no idea what she must look like from his point of view. The others in her party turned, surprised, and stared at the image.

"You can see him?" Gwen asked Han and Leia.

Han nodded.Leia quietly said, "Yes."

"Atton!" Anna found herself calling. She had grown to dislike the rogue, but here he was such a solid thing, a reminder of when her life had been without time-travel. She suddenly remembered her imprisonment in Atris' Academy, before she had hated him. He had been as much a comfort as anyone, then.

"What is this?" He asked, managing to sound arrogant instead of confused, spreading his hands.

"We're in another time—we're in the future. You've got to tell someone, Atton, tell the Jedi! Rakatan technology sent us here—"

He sounded calm, but he moved hurriedly through the unfamiliar ship, and the image moved with him as if a recorder were floating over his shoulder. "I'll be on my way to the Academy now." He took a moment to gather his thoughts, to run a nervous hand through his floppy, dark hair. "Did you find Revan?"

"I did, she's here with me."

"Anna?"

The image was fading without warning. Anna gasped, but did not give him the satisfaction of her crying his name again, even though it stalled upon her lips. Why couldn't the message have gone to someone else? His stricken visage disappeared, and Anna was left staring over the blue crystal in her hand at her companions. She said into the silence, "I don't know any more about what just happened than you do."

Luke looked utterly amazed, and then as if he was going to say something. Gwen spoke first. "Just like old times," she said seriously. "Going to different planets, collecting things."

Anna asked, "Has anyone else heard of—"

The word "Ba-ion" was cancelled out by Gwen and Luke whirling around to stare at the entrance of the ruin at the same time.

"An absence in the Force," Luke breathed; Gwen nodded.

"Someone's trying to shield themselves from us."

The companions spread out, taking cover behind columns or backing up to the walls next to the room's entrance, drawing weapons. In the silence, four creatures moved into the ruin's first room, stubby legs carrying their yellow-scaled bodies just above the dusty floor. With them came ten-meter-radius bubbles of Force blindness, obscuring whatever, if anything, might be following them.

_A/N: Yay, cliffie. Muahaha. The same disclaimers which applied to dialogue last chapter apply to this one as well. Sorry about the delay in updating; this chapter took so long to write! College--and __**Vengeance**__, and Silver Sky1138's __**Voice of the Shadows**__, and DeviantArt—stole my attention away. I recommend them all. _


	17. Discovery and Loss

XVII

_**A few days earlier**_

Boba Fett watched stock values rise and fall for a moment before he flicked the HoloNet off and left the ship to begin the hunt.

His career really was all about the credits now. Thirty years ago he had still had the personal vendetta against Jedi. Then, bounty hunting, without or without a fatality as the end result, had created rare, savored moments of power in the life of a boy who had watched helplessly as his father was slaughtered. Now, he had come down off the rage and forgotten what had once motivated him to kill. He was more moral now. Bounty hunting was still what he knew best and excelled at, and what brought credits into his account. However, it wasn't personal. His heart, as they say, had hardened.

He did feel respect for Han Solo. The man had avoided Fett too many times for it to be just luck that kept the Empire's bedazzling reward for his capture out of the Mandalorian's coffers. He had gotten smart this time, and by accident or design surrounded himself with Fett's toughest quarry, Jedi.

Boba lifted a container out of a hatch on the outside of the _Slave I _and set it on Dantooine's windswept grass. In it, a yellow reptile was tightly curled around its own flabby body, gray claws poking through the cage bars. It looked like nothing more than an ugly animal to Boba, as did its siblings, but knowledge, and the price of the beasts on the black market, testified to their worth. Ysalamiri nullified Jedi powers. He would need them, to pull as many bounty heads as he could out of the team of Jedi and Rebels.

_**4 ABY**_

"Take them out!"

Leia looked at Gwen, surprised. "The animals?"

"Ysalamiri." Gwen said. The lightsabers snapped to life in her hands. " They neutralize the Force. We're under attack by someone who knows us, and wants an advantage."

Luke understood. He took his blaster in hand and shot at the lizard crawling nearest him—he could feel the loss of his hold on the universe. The Force was not absent, but instead of a keyboard on which to enter commands, it felt like an unresponsive wall, on which his mental fingers slipped. The ysalamiri skittered up a wall, instinct and terror keeping it out of the paths of the blaster bolts that lanced around it. Luke saw the almost comedic sight of Anna and Bao-Dur chasing ysalamiri down. As he felt the Force weakly return, part of the ceiling collapsed.

Luke jumped away from the sudden shaft of sunlight through which the last thousands of years' dust, rubble, dirt, and roots came pouring into the chamber of the Star Map. He blinked his eyes, feeling tears begin to wash away the sudden explosion of grit. When his eyes cleared her wiped off the instinctive tears with the back of his hand and looked around; Leia lay nearby him, looking up; gray detritus stained her white clothing over her hip. He saw lightsabers, neon colors made pastel by the thickness of the dust in the air, piercing the darkness across the room, and sensed alertness and power and a ysalamir near him, sighing its life out under a chunk of stone—

The sound of a whip whizzed through the air. In the next moment, a humanoid silhouette eclipsed the sun and, in a movement which seemed surprisingly gentle after Luke realized what it was, Han was snared and pulled, struggling and cursing, recognizable in the sudden glare and light only by his voice, up into the hole in the roof. _Boba Fett_, Luke realized; the calculating, ruthless bounty hunterhad engendered this trap.

Thoughts flashed through Luke's mind; _He's been following us, using the lizards to cover his presence. And he knew we'd come for the ruins. Listening too, then, perhaps with probe droids. He knows we seek the Rakatan computers, and, maybe, the crystals. And the Empire will know next._

He heard rocks move as the others reacted. They had registered Fett's presence now, and he theirs. Suddenly a column of flame followed the rubble down into the room. Scorching heat washed against Luke's Force shields and he lunged for Leia. He wrapped his arms around her as she struggled to her feet and both of them fell to the floor again—elbows bruised but body otherwise untouched by the fire, he got up in time to catch her by the arm as she lunged toward the bright circle in the center of the room, aiming her blaster and firing a storm of shots at unseen Fett. Luke pulled her to the side again as fire splashed down into the room like a waterfall. This time, when it ended, he clearly saw Boba Fett, flamethrower in hand, step back from the breach.

Leia slapped Luke. His head rocked to the side with the force of it—such an unexpected attack dazed him, but he clearly felt her pain at losing Han again, at not knowing that Fett was coming, about being unable to leap up into the sunlight and attack the bounty hunter on her own. Gwen, Anna, and Mical, also untouched by the fire but dissuaded from following Fett, paused below the shaft of light. He had another ysalamir near him, Luke knew, because wherever he had gone he had disappeared from the Force. _His ship must be waiting up there_, Luke thought, _to take Han away_—

"Someone go after him!" Leia screamed. She latched onto Luke's arm and shook him, gently, apologizing inside for the slap but also so full of fear and adrenaline that her fingernails dug into his sleeve.

"He could have anything trained on us," Mical said, his soft voice incongruous to the deathly serious expression in his blue eyes. He walked a few steps to get closer to the light and Luke saw that one of his sleeves was blackened into ash, the skin next to it scorched a dangerous pink shade of pale.

Gwen gestured and sent a wave of Force-propelled air whooshing up like a tornado into the hole, carrying dust with it,. "Come on." She jumped up onto the top of the half-buried room, secure in the knowledge that she had cleared the area above her and could deal with anything that awaited her. Mical followed; Anna tossed Luke the query "Are you alright?" before turning her attention from him and speaking into her commlink.

"We need backup right away."

**The Exile's message, **Carth thought, could not have been conveyed in a more round-about way. He was sitting restlessly in the men's dormitory on the _Hawk_, alternately worrying about Gwen and telling himself that she was with Jedi, she would be alright, too many people would have made coordinating the mission needlessly complicated and would in fact be a detracting factor if they were attacked in the confined space they were headed to-- HK-47 stalked into the room, leveled his photoreceptors at Carth, continued the pontification he had brought in.

"…clever meatbag. He forgot any nonsense about blasters working against Jedi. You really need something with a _splash radius_. That way, if there are any innocent civilians in the way, the Jedi will be morally compelled to jump into the line of fire, and conveniently—"

Carth shouted, "Shut up! What are you talking about?"

"Statement: I received a message through the ship's comm from Anna Sacul, stating that she and the others with her are under an attack." The droid sounded confused, or perhaps as if he were savoring the news.

Immediately Carth stood up. "We'll go to them, then. What's attacking?"

"Identification: I believe it is the bounty hunter Boba Fett. He possesses Han Solo, various weapons, and, most likely, a ship."

Carth rushed through the _Hawk_. In the common room he found Mission sitting on a couch; clapping her on the shoulder, he said, "Tell Bao-Dur and Zaalbar that we're going to rescue Gwen."

Abruptly she stood up. "I can help!"

They held one another's stares for a moment. He remembered their first argument in the sewer-tunnels of Taris, with her barbs about his age. Had that been the first time he had cared about what Gwen thought of him? He had found himself wondering whether she too saw him as old and spent.

He shook himself out of this soft frame of mind, returning his attention to Mission and to his own duty as commanding officer. The Twi'lek needed experience, and her participation in this task could boost morale. "Fine. Take a cannon. And don't mess up, kid."  
"Yes sir!" Mission nodded seriously, with a slight suggestion of sarcasm, and ran out of the common room. Carth hurried forward into the cockpit, sent a basic distress call to the _Millennium Falcon_, and punched in a startup sequence without waiting for someone to join him. No one needed to, not if he was flying planetside to a location he knew and if Zaalbar were the available co-pilot.

"Ready." Mission's voice came over the internal comm. Bao-Dur double clicked to the same effect.

Energetic ion engines roared to life, sending vibrations through the deck plating under Carth's feet. The ship lifted off, and with a push of the joysticks he prompted the landscape of Dantooine to whip past the viewport.

**Fett was a **Mandalorian; Gwen saw him clearly for the first time and instantly recognized the armor and helmet design. She didn't recognized the make and model of the flamethrower he held, but the weapon, not its owner, was currently the most important part of the tableau of Fett, his hulking, green-plated ship, Han, trussed and motionless in the grass, and herself. She darted forward into the ysalamiri's obscuring sphere of influence and jabbed her fingers against the nerves at Fett's elbow between the sections of armor before. He did not react fast enough; his arm fell limp; the heavy, gun-shaped weapon dropped into Gwen's waiting hand. She tucked it to her side, arm muscles straining, in danger of overbalancing and dropping it. Fett kicked up at her face, surprisingly flexible. Honed reflexes, not the Force, enabled her to dodge out of his reach. He reached for a holstered blaster—

Mical and Anna flew up from the ruin, all three lightsaber blades live and spinning down toward Fett the second their wielders' feet hit the ground. Fett stepped backwards, gun trained on the new arrivals. Gwen went after him, hearing Luke's voice a second later as he jumped out of the shadowed room and wavered on the edge for a moment, empty hands grasping at the air.

"Master Bolwyn, no!"

Gwen jumped backwards. A ring of explosions split the air between the Jedi and Fett. When the granades' dark aftereffect left her eyes she saw the bounty hunter dragging Solo up the ship's ramp. The explosions continued to sputter, then died, but by that time the ship began to hum—already Luke and Anna had slipped back into the ruin to avoid the blast of its imminent takeoff. Gwen threw herself toward the hole and fell onto the hard ground inside beside Mical, who took her by the elbow and moved with her to a corner of the room away from the opening, near the antechamber. Then a wash of heat and sound saturated the Star Map room; Gwen backpedaled, seeing Luke and Leia already crouching behind a wall near one of the computers. Moments later the Force returned completely and she could sense the _Hawk _rocketing toward them.

Anna announced, "Help's on its way."

Leia cried out, "We have to go after Han."

Luke nodded beside her, blue eyes wide. Gwen had a decision to make.

"Chasing him," she said, "will take time away from the quest we now have."

"Is it that imperative?" Leia snapped. Gwen thought with a pang of Carth, but also of Anna's vision of Atton; what was happening in her own time? How imperative _was _it that they get back? She did not know either way.

"They're here," Mical said. He sat on the dusty floor, head bowed in meditation, healing the bruises and scrapes the party had accumulated. Deep in the Force, he could sense the _Hawk _and the _Falcon _just as Gwen could. She briefly admired his serenity in the midst of chaos.

"Come on!" Leia ran to the entrance to the ruin and the rest of the party pursued her through the maze of standing stones, to where the two ships had settled, the _Falcon _to the fore. The ramp lowered and Chewbacca stormed out, roaring and raising his arms. Leia dashed onto the ramp and turned back, breathing heavily in the run's wake. It seemed that her intense gaze, like a searchlight, hit Gwen's eyes for a moment and steadied on Luke's, pleading for an answer and an ally. She would not change her mind.

Indecision flared in the Force from Luke. He stammered, "The Jedi, Leia, I need to learn…"

Her face hardened; Gwen saw frostiness, but also the poise that showed she deserved the title 'princess'. "Good luck." She said, and turned her back on him, Chewbacca following with as much fear and anger in his sense and stance as in any of the humans'. There was a surge of emotion and decision; Gwen turned to see Mical kiss Anna and run after the departing Leia. He stopped at the end of the ramp and saluted her, standing straight, the picture of a gallant knight.

" Princess, might you permit me to accompany you, to offer my aid, and to continue my academic studies of this era?"

She turned back for a second and gestured with her blaster for him to follow her.

He jogged up the ramp without hesitation. Anna came to Gwen's side, calmer than the elder Jedi expected her to be. "He'll meet up with us again," she said. "He feels bad leaving her without anyone. Without Luke. So…valiant and stupid." She ducked her head, smiled coyly, ran a hand through her hair. Gwen looked at her for a short moment before waving the rest of the party forward to the _Hawk_.


	18. The Princess and the Jedi

XVIII

Anna found herself remembering that Mical had once alphabetized all of the holodiscs for the entertainment system. They had been Davik Kang's, and were mostly classics, two-dimensional-looking and well-acted, tending towards the blue side of the spectrum. Their content had been of no concern of Mical; Anna couldn't remember him ever watching them, but one day when he wanted to do something he didn't have to think about, he'd alphabetized them.

That wasn't attractive. She looked at it clinically as a facet of his personality, of his bookishness, and it simply _wasn't attractive._ But she would skim over the history books for him. She would recognize his neatness and comfort zone and need for learning. She'd liked the way he looked, the way he idolized her, the ease of his movements and the _Jedi-ness _of him. But when they spent time together and she found out how much he wrote, how quiet he was, she took it along with all the things about him that she liked. That she loved. Because she loved him, or so she thought.

So why was she so _okay _with him leaving her now?

"He had that planned," she said to Revan, because he had, and because she had to. Someone had to know. Revan would ask whether Anna was alright, and Anna wasn't sure that she wanted to talk. Was it, she found herself wondering, because she had something to hide? It was the sort of silence which contains plans.

She followed Gwen up the _Hawk_'s ramp in the wake of the others. Carth, HK-47, Bao-Dur, Mission, and Zaalbar were waiting for them, shadows falling over their faces. Bao-Dur looked vaguely menacing, his skin almost gray, as he leaned against a bulkhead.

"Fett got away with Solo," said Gwen seriously, with the voice of a commander of forces. Anna sensed sadness from Mission. The Exile, recalling her few campaigns with Revan, remembered her as a distant figurehead, legendary and—not this woman who now brushed against her arm with subtle, accidental movement and who had cried with her, had loved with more stability than her.

"So what's our next move?" Carth asked.

Gwen wasn't moving out of the intersection of two hallways, so no one else was. Luke stood close beside Anna, wearing a white shirt, cheerless. Gwen said, "Leia took the mission of finding the bounty hunter upon herself, and Mical accompanied her. She has the resources of the Rebellion. Luke stays with us, to continue his training. We need to travel to three planets, to find Rakatan ruins as I suspected. These will enable us to return to our own time, with Anna's help. We'll explain more in a moment. Excuse me, HK…" She led the group into the common room and it was with relief that they sat down on couches or stood comfortably. Carth kept to Gwen's shoulder, more like a second-in-command than anything else, Anna thought.

Gwen continued, "We were told that ruins vital to the success of our mission exist on three planets; Iridonia, Duros, and Ba-ion. Has anyone ever heard of that last one?"

Mission piped up with, "Isn't that a nice world out on the Outer Rim?"

"That's Bastion," said Carth. He shrugged. "The name Ba-ion's not in my memory banks."

"Then we'll work on that," said Gwen.

"I know parts of Iridonia," said Bao-Dur. "We could go there first."

Gwen nodded. Luke asked, "How do we know which part of these planets to look for the crystal on?"

Gwen said, "When I was looking for the Star Maps, I had downloaded the general locations from those computers we used." She flipped open her datapad. "It looks like we have that now, too downloaded from after I answered the question correctly. Iridonia appears to be as good a place as any to start."

Carth asked, "What exactly happened when you while you were gone? Besides being attacked, I mean. These crystals, are they connected to the Star Maps?"

"Only in that they're both Rakatan," Gwen answered. Anna felt flush; she was going to be discussed now, as if she were what she was: the fulfillment of a prophecy. "Apparently, the nature of our Exile," and Gwen looked fondly at Anna, not obviously, in the kindest way Anna thought possible, "is connected to the crystals. Their coming together in the Force is what brought us here. Luckily for us, the Rakatan computers and records survived, and we found that if we put the four crystals and Anna together, we can return to where we came."

"None of that explains the appearance of Atton," Anna said.

"No it doesn't." Gwen looked at Carth. "We briefly spoke to her friend Atton, who seemed to be back in our time. He mentioned your other companions, who are starting a Jedi academy, correct?" She looked at Anna, who nodded, unsure as to whether she should correct the word _friend_. She wouldn't know what to replace it with. "Time distortion like that was never mentioned by the Rakatan computer."

"Maybe the Force enabled it." Luke said. "He might be connected to your destiny."

"_Destiny_'s a weighted word," Anna murmured, and no one gave signs of hearing her.

"I'd like to take a further look at the crystal," Bao-Dur said.

Anna nodded, fished the crystal out of her belt pouch and dropped it into his gloved hand. He stood, wordlessly asked Gwen for permission to leave, and did, with a small bow of his head; Anna stood up too, trusting that the conversation was at an end. "I'm going to take a nap," she mumbled, and Gwen watched as she disappeared into the corridor toward the girls' dormitory.

HK-47 stalked back to his niche, and Zaalbar snuffled something to Mission to which she replied, "Alright, don't eat all our rations!" before the Wookiee also departed. Carth, Gwen, Mission, and Luke were left. Luke sat leaning between the couch and the holoprojector, with his elbows crossed on it and his head dipping toward them.

"I'll miss Han," Mission said loudly, after a glance at Luke which Gwen wasn't sure he caught. "Hey, he was funny. And he loved this ship. You ever hear him talk about that, Carth? He thought it was so good for an old thing."

Luke's head lifted up. Gwen hurried to find words. "He was a good guy. Treated Leia well. Flew real well." She elbowed Carth playfully and he took her arm in his hands, moving closer toward her on the couch. "She can take care of herself, too. She'll get him back, with her Alliance."

"I just…" Luke spoke, voice crisp and quiet. "I can't lose them. This is like…I lost my Master once. The one who taught me the Force. If Han and Leia too…" In the Force his mind flinched, distancing itself.

"You _won't_." Gwen said. She turned toward him, eyes intense, speaking with a conviction she hadn't known she had. Born of the Force or of her own determination, she could speak these words and know them to be truth. "We won't let you. If Leia needs us and calls we'll go to her, as quickly as this ship and these pilots can take you. Stay strong, Luke. You can prevent their deaths yourself."

"Can I? I'm not strong in the Force like you."

Gwen laughed, and stood up. Carth stood with her, then pressed on her hand and told her that he was going to start the ship. She nodded. "I'll be there in a moment." She looked down at Luke, then. "You don't _think _you are. You think that because we're from the Republic, because we've got titles and official Masters and Padawans, that we're better than you, more well-equipped to use power. I, I know, am equipped enough to know that you have so much potential in you that I'd be afraid to fight you, if only you learned some more. Stand up."

He did. She pointed, sighting along her finger at HK-47. Gwen winked at Mission. "Point at him." She told Luke. Hesitantly, confused, he did; his hands, she noted, were larger than hers, and corded with muscle. "HK thinks he's real tough. He is, too. But you can pick him up and throw him across the room, or whatever you want. You're a Force user. You're not going to go around using your power on people, but you _could. _I think you're too timid. Pick him up, and you better do something afterward too or else he'll probably shoot you."

"Are you sure—" Luke began.

HK-47 looked up. "Query: Master, have you not learned by experience that I have very good hearing?"

"Please cooperate," Gwen said, stepping out from between Luke and HK-47. The droid raised his blaster.

Luke splayed his fingers. HK-47's legs flew out from under him and in the next moment he was suspended upside down, feet almost scraping the ceiling. Undauntedly he twisted his upper body around and regained aim on Luke—the young Jedi gestured in a sideways sweeping motion, and HK-47 hurtled out of the niche and across the room, banging against the roof once, never crying out. He hit a wall and slid to the floor in an awkward humped crouch, blaster trapped beneath his body. Luke advanced, hands held out.

"Threat: Meatbag…" HK-47 said in a tone of warning, but when he tried to get up he seemed to twitch. He fell back fully against the wall and lay there, unable to move because of the Force pressure exerted upon him. Gwen sensed power like white light cascading off of Luke, no anger either, but a righteous calmness that gave him just as much energy as its simpler, dark side equivalent.

"Good," said Revan with a smile. "You just won a live-munitions battle, Luke. You didn't think you could, did you? We'll work on more Force powers later. I'm going to go help fly."

She began to walk toward the cockpit, and had taken a few steps through the round hallway when she heard a word from HK-47 cut off and metal rattle against the wall again.

"You need to tell him to stop trying to kill me, Master Bolywn, or I'll hold him here all day," said Luke.

Gwen barked a laugh as she looked at the tableau in the hold. Mission, safely sitting on the back of a couch on the other side of the room, laughed too, holding her stomach, her lekku bouncing. "Stop trying to kill him, HK." Gwen commanded.

The droid got to his feet, holding the blaster threateningly pointed at Luke. "Request: Do not use me for this exercise again, master. You may find yourself bereft of an apprentice."

"You're exactly the kind of opponent this one needs." Gwen said with a smile.

HK-47 walked back to his niche calmly, no doubt thinking of new and very effective ways to counter Luke's Force powers. Gwen smiled at him, and tentatively he smiled back.

**The **_**Millennium Falcon**_ hummed around them. Mical stood, trapped awkwardly in a forest of lights from the ship's computer, behind Princess Leia and Chewbacca as they sent the ship into hyperspace. There had been silence thus far. Mical stood in his memory of Anna's hand in his own, and in his realization that he was a Jedi Knight on a rescue mission, protecting a princess, and so his life bred happiness.

Not joy, no, perhaps because Leia did not trust him. She showed it by turning around once the course was secured. He sensed her distrust, how she felt the ground was cracking beneath her feet.

She put a hand on her holstered blaster. "Historians are almost as disliked by the Empire as Jedi are." She said. "It doesn't want people thinking too much about glories not its own."

He had not been expecting that. He had to remember that she was a diplomat—and he was not. Into the humming background noise he said, "I do not mean to unsettle you, princess."

"I hadn't expected you to come. You've got your own love to return to. I don't know your motives."

"They are purely humanitarian, I assure you. I wished to help."

"I believe that. Curiosity is part of your nature. That's another reason Imperials don't like historians. They're too observant, too much like spies."

Pause. "Is not the Alliance largely composed of spies and defectors?"

"People who defected from the Imperial military, yes, they've been spies for us, but—we're decent people, most of us, citizens, not all like…Han."

Chewbacca huffed; Leia partly turned around, and gripped the pilot's seat in one pink-knuckled hand.

"Oh, I'm sorry—" Mical reached a hand toward her, to pat her shoulder.

She moved neither toward or away from him. "I know. I brought that on myself. I…will clear my mind."

Mical nodded.

Throughout the flight, the princess and the Jedi maintained a professional relationship. It took a few days for her to tell him where they were going; the Rebel fleet positioned at a staging point near Sullust. Admiral Ackbar met the _Falcon_'s crew personally with condolences for Han, and Leia resisted beginning discussion about rescuing him immediately. Other things—alliances, intelligence—took first priority.

She introduced Mical as one of the Jedi whom she had recently been aiding. A background check was done on him and came up entirely blank. Because this made sense for a Jedi, he was permitted in and respected. Often, he kept silent.


	19. Iridonia

XIX

"First planet of the quest." Anna murmured sarcastically. It was raining on the highlands of Iridonia, rain pouring on the hull, on the jagged rocks, running in rivulets between the obsidian frozen paroxysms of land. Gwen and the rest were watching Anna, waiting for her to choose who would venture out and who would stay on the ship. Anna was part of the scientists' prophecy, and so Gwen had suggested she should take on some more leadership responsibility than she had been. "Master Bolwyn," she said. "and Bao-Dur." A powerhouse and a native. She had a strategy.

Anna opened the door onto a corridor of flat, dark-marbled stone between ridges of glacial shards half as tall again as the ship, The sky was blue, and Anna knew that there were pleasant, forested regions on this world; the Rakatan equations had not, in keeping with the rest of Anna's luck, pointed to them.

The moment she stepped onto the ramp, the Force warned—danger from below. But no groundquake rumbled up from the bedrock; nothing moved except the rain and the cloud-shredding wind. Anna glanced at her companions. They knew no more than she did.

The floor of the canyon cracked, beneath the ship and in front of Anna's feet. The boarding ramp tipped and spilled the Jedi onto the ground; Carth's voice crackled from Gwen's personal commlink and Anna could not understand the words over the shifting of the land around her. Her shoulder struck against paving stones. The ground split in front of her eyes, becoming flat, gray horns of pebble-skinned animals. They were quadrupeds which had been laying side by side en mass, their horns arcing like carapaces from the back of their skulls to their haunches, reptilian tails, and the snout of the creature lying behind them. When they stood, the road transformed into a pack of predatory animals beneath Anna's feet, silent but for the scrape and clunk of rocky hides.

"Merks," said Bao-Dur.

Lightsabers ignited, Gwen leapt up toward the boarding ramp. Anna stabbed down at the creature which had risen up between her feet and was snapping at her armored legs as she stumbled away, almost sitting on top of it; it collapsed, and one of her feet hit solid dirt. The merks swarmed her. She slashed with her first lightsaber blade and cut the horned heads like butter, but their numbers dashed themselves against her like waves, biting and shoving—she slid her hand down her weapon and lit the second blade. Immediately it speared through the chest of a merk behind her. She flicked that blade up and became a whirlwind, staff lightsaber spinning around her. A Force wave from Gwen's hand sent merks tumbling away into the air, but more came, like a landslide—Anna glimpsed Bao-Dur plowing through merks like a capital ship, the over-wide swings of his orange lightsaber corrected by the pack of animals launching themselves at his _face_—

Warm blood rolled down next to Anna's ear when a merk reached up with a clawed hand and slashed; it fell away a moment later, smoke trickling from its body from the round stab wound in its chest. She slashed, sliced, kicked, shouted. Rain cold on her hair, sky the color of gunmetal. Gwen's Force backing was gone; she had retreated and sealed the ship doors to keep the merks out. The _Hawk_ hovered and hummed, the gunners deliberating whether to shoot into the fray of animals and stranded Jedi. Anna had no time to focus the Force to enter the beasts' minds; ineffectively she sensed the maddened merks' hunger. She stepped, killed, was lonely, wished the fight would end.

When it didn't, she enjoyed it to compensate.

The clean neon afterglow of lightsaber strikes, sky-colored, merks' dying yelps, the blood on her hands and in her eyes, so rare in a world of lightsabers and blasters—these were loud, vital, overwhelming. When they began to feel essential, as if she had never known anything else in her life, volatile anger at such injustice filled her mind.

Then she stopped caring whether she stopped.

Merks scratched the ground and one another and Anna's armor. One alone was weak, but these were a tide. They made no sounds.

Mandalorians screamed battle-cries in her head.

_Her lightsaber sheered through multicolored armor, cutting through Mandalorian shells to the meat beneath._

She heard the whir of the _Hawk_'s repulsors and the screams of blasterfire.

_Republic warships thundered overhead, sounding too low. General Sacul pressed forward, out of control, putting bodies between herself and anyone who might see her._

Bao-Dur pushed through the fray toward her, his mind a mix of his perpetual calm and a reflection of the ugly rage that gave her strength.

_Lieutenant General Braka was fighting toward her. He was going to die._

Bao-Dur was talking next to her, the pathway merks thinned out around them. She lunged away, needing to throw herself against more opposition, to finally _not think at all_—

_A Mandalorian screamed as Anna sliced her open from shoulder to hip. Her comrade came for Anna with bloody wrist blades. _

Out of control, she barely noticed that the darkness of a cave swept over her like the line between night and day as she stumbled off the path. Bao-Dur was pushing her out of the pouring rain, one implacable hand gripping her arm. The rage beat through him too—she could feel it in the Force, the need to keep the thick, safe haze of insensate wrath. She could feel it in the pressure of his touch. She wanted to keep_ killing_ because it would kill the ghosts of her past, and because it was _easy_--

"General. General."

She wasn't paying any attention. She was being swept away into bloodlust, ignoring her lightsaber being pulled from her hand and the hum silenced. She was being swept into the dark side, by the agony of _war, the retreat of the Force_--

Bao-Dur kissed her. The shock of rain-cold and battle-hot contact, of someone so strong and alien pressing his weight against hers, acted like a slap, banishing the haze and the flashbacks from Anna's mind. He pulled her farther into the cave, away from the few remaining merks. He looked up to adhere a small glowlamp to the nearest wall, and then bent near her again. She hesitated to press her hands against his shirt. Her rational thoughts and most memories were gone; the only thing that mattered was her combat-companion, her hands sliding across his chest to bunch the fabric over the hard muscles of his arms, his mouth against hers again. There was something she needed to remember; a conversation and a face, but they darted away like insects.

He ran a hand over her head and dug metal fingers into her thick hair.

She slid her arms around his shoulders and remembered to breathe.

**The rain struck** the viewport. Gwen squinted against it and the yellow glare of the sun. From the gun turret she could see that the horde of merks had retreated, falling into the ground like puzzle pieces.

Revan had been a strategist. Gwen _knew _that sending two agents—two Jedi, one an apprentice and the other emotionally unstable—into a narrow canyon teeming with hostiles was a terrible idea. Nevertheless, that was what had been done, because of lack of intelligence. Anna and Bao-Dur were alive. They had been unable to escape as she had, but she knew they lived, and all that that implied. She would not regret enough to debilitate herself. Each person in the crew had a quota of regret owed them, and the rest of life had to be assuaged by action.

Gwen said, "Bring us down in the next place you can."

Carth said through the comm., "Looks like there's a mining town in these mountains. It's small, but we can set down there."

"How far away?"

"About a klick."

"That'll be fine."

The rain clouds gave way to a brilliant sunset as the _Hawk _rose higher for its few-minute journey. Gwen loosened her hands around the triggers. She could go down to the common room before the landing, but this sky invited thoughts. They weren't the most pleasant thoughts, either.

Gwen had felt Anna's emotions while the ship lifted off. She needed to learn about them, for the exile's eventual healing. An old wound had been reopened. After her emotions settled, though, it could heal.

She hoped the males in Anna's life would. The Jedi Master Anna Sacul was powerful and adept at teaching. The woman Anna was capricious and indecisive, focused on honing her martial skills rather than pondering what the Jedi's morals regarding emotion meant. The combination made her volatile. This moment was her trial by fire, as well as Bao-Dur's.

Gwen thought that it would be best to leave them alone for a time, so that she could calm down, find a balance, make a rational decision and a plan for the future.

She hoped that it would include what Anna was going to say to Mical.


	20. Sun and Shade

XX

The town which the navicomputer labeled Lesae was one dusty block with a tiny spaceport on one end and the mountains, mines, and mining equipment on the other. giant droids did the dirty work underground, but the town supplied mechanics, engineers, and those who supplied _them_. Gwen, Carth, and Luke ventured down the quiet main street. The only building which looked open to the public was the cantina, and so they entered it.

The interior was dimly lit but unlike the spaceport cantinas Gwen was used to in that there was a homey sort of feel to it; the tables and bar appeared to be stained wood, not pitted plastic, and music emanated from a set of speakers without accompanying dancers. In the center of the room, separate from the other shadowed tables from which the ever-present background hum of conversation emanated, there was a rounded table where four Iridonian Zabraks sat shuffling cards. Two males and one female there looked like most of the patrons; they were muscular, simply clothed beings with horn-crowned heads and stern faces crisscrossed by tribal tattoos. The fourth individual was a boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen standard years of age, with a web of aquamarine stripes tattooed across his face below his eyes. One stripe on either side of his face ran past his ear to the root of his short, black hair. Purplish bruises showed beneath his skin in patches, attesting to his recent acquisition of the tattoos. As Gwen and her companions approached the table, the three adult Zabraks stood up with cards in hand and began to pull their coats on.

The teen's parting words t them could be dimly heard over the background babble. "So, what did the Gammorean say to the Thakwaash?" He paused for effect and didn't really make one. "Why the long face?" Even he didn't laugh, but looked after the three cardplayers imploringly as they departed.

Gwen moved closer and spoke to him across the table. "May we sit?"

He scanned them with dark eyes, and after a moment, said, "Yeah, sure."

"Thank you." A chair scraped as Gwen pulled it out.

"We don't get humans around a lot," the boy asked nervously.

"We're here in need," Gwen said. Experience taught her to obscure her true goal, whether it was a crystal or a Star Map. The blanket statement 'treasure' attracted too many of the entirely wrong sort of people, but the Force guided every encounter if she simply spoke to people who were trustworthy or in need. "Friends of ours are lost in the mountains near here, in passes we can't get our ship into."

His eyes widened. "They're on foot? Force be with you. An offworlder won't stand a chance against the merks. They can't be seen if you don't know the signs."

"One of them is Iridonian. But we need to get to them. We can pay you, if you'd like, in Republic credits." She struggled to remember how much she had in modern currency. "Is there a path into the mountains that you could guide us to?"

"I could help you with that, yeah. I know some of the trails. You've asked the right person, honestly; I'm not working all the time, because I'm the governor's son."

"We'll take what we can get," she replied. "I'm Gwen Bolwyn." Her companions introduced themselves; Luke did not give his surname.

"Nice to meet you.Khalan Morlin, amateur comedian."

Carth couldn't resist."Really."

"Yeah. Here—one gizka says to another, 'Does it smell funny here'? The other one says, 'By the Force, a talking gizka!"

Gwen stood up. "Thank you."

"Ah, yeah, it's almost late shift. You might way to be on your way…I can meet you here tomorrow."

"Is at noon good for you?"

"That's fine."

The three went back out onto the street; stars were beginning to show, bright silver against the cloudless black sky. As the door shut behind them, Carth murmured, "I can only take so much of that."

Gwen smiled. "I know. I really hoped gizka were extinct."

**Bao-Dur lay on **the floor of the cave, uneven stones uncomfortable against his back. Anna's head was on his shoulder, one thin hand flung across his chest. Their feet almost touched. He appreciated the warmth.

What was she dreaming as she slept? What would she think, what did she expect when she woke up?

He had kissed her for one reason only; to stop her rage. She had begun to lose grip on reality, and a slap would have done absolutely nothing to bring her back. Their conversation on the balcony on Kashyyyk had told him what would.

That was the only reason. It was the only reason that he had let her kiss him again, the only reason that they had huddled together. He had been saving the life of the General, saving her from taking on more than even she could handle, like he had done before. That was the reason. Except it wasn't, because he was thinking about it far too much.

She was Mical's. Except she still seemed eager to be his, too.

So indecisive. He wanted to breathe in the scent of her hair, and he had not before.

_It's the Force_, he thought, which he had been without for so long. _She draws people to her, models their emotions on her own. _What he felt was an unconscious mindtrick. He had never been a romantically inclined being. These emotions could not be his own.

But then she stirred and sat up, moving with a familiarity so alien to him. She sat straight on the cave floor, palms against the stone ground that water had carved into a bowl in this corner of the cave. She looked small; her hair was not long enough for sleep to matter to how it looked. Her mind was clear, but soon she would see the blood on her hands. How lucky that their foes had been merks, not men.

She looked at her chronometer as if to avoid meeting his eyes. It was 0700—he had checked recently as well. Saying 'good morning' would be too personal. She rubbed sleep from her eyes, and, watching her still, he did not know what to say.

"I thought you felt nothing for me," she said finally, fixating on his eyes. "On Kashyyyk."

"I wanted to help you," he replied gently. "There are many scars of the war left."

Her eyebrows contracted. "Have I gone to the dark side?"

"That would be an oversimplification, I think. Your emotions are strong." He sat up, almost lost in thought as he spoke. "You care passionately. Jedi, if I have been taught correctly, control such things, because they affect the world."

Her head drooped, and she nodded. "The nexus."

His perceptions of her had changed. Where once her weakness had been unsettling, and out of character for her, now it was something he could help and wanted to change, something to deepen their relationship with. He reached out, cupped her face in his hands, and tilted her head so that she looked up at him.

"It is the dark side." Shivers ran down her back; she gripped his hands with the Force, her own adhered to the cool ground. "I needed control, when I didn't have any over myself, and when given a, a population weaker than me, killing them is the ultimate control. When I can't even decide who to love."

He did not know what to say. He could not set her at arms' length now, but what else was right? What else would hurt? He could only say "We should move out of this cave, General, and find the others."

"Go back?" She scoffed. But she moved away from him and stood up, idly checking that her lightsaber was secure on her belt. She cast about in the Force for Revan. "They're here...a distance away, but we can walk it I think. Across the mountains, though. Can we make it? What other creatures do we need to watch out for?"

"Now we know how to identify merks." He stood too, and brushed dust off his pant legs. "There are also felines here, but their attacks will be straightforward. We won't have trouble, with lightsabers, against them. But I do not know this area well. I was born in the south."

"We'll make it," she said. "We have to." She took a few steps toward the cave's exit and waited for him to catch up. The sun shone brightly outside, but the roof of the cave was an overhang at the mouth, and so a severe line of shadow separated them from the canyon outside. Merks, he knew, might still be waiting, but there would be few enough that they could be avoided by walking on the opposite side of the path, and perhaps they would remember the bite of a lightsaber blade. The battle was very clear in his mind now, but it was Anna he remembered, not himself; her rain-slicked hair, her slack mouth at the end when she screamed at phantoms of Mandalorians. Out of control, the Force cascaded inside her. And he did not know that it had not inside him; some portions of the memory were obscured, only indicated by cold impressions of killing to survive. He had harnessed wrath in the Wars, but then forsworn it. How much had come back? How much was engrained, in his culture and his personality, and would fight him until he died or reached Mastery?

Or until he gave in.

Anna turned and looked at him, her face twisted for a moment in a grimace, as if she knew what he was thinking. She probably did, he knew. And so he was doubly frightened, doubly conflicted, when her next expression was a sincere, beautiful smile. _What's left_?, her eyes seemed to say, as if to the ashes of a childhood home. Much was left, he knew, but her attitude was addictive. She nested inside his thoughts, now, entirely unlike when she had been simply his superior.

They walked out into the sun, wary of attack, certain that they would know it was coming before it came.

_A/N: Thank you so much to the consistent reviewers and favorites'ers. I enjoyed writing this chapter's scene with Revan. I put a new character (yay for the socially inept Zabrak…), a cantina, creatures (merks, the Iridonian equivalent of kath hounds or kinrath) and party selection to make it feel 'KOTOR'-y, and I think it succeeded. This is the first planet we're actually going to spend more than a chapter on, I think, and so it's a bit of an exercise in "level design" for me. What did y'all think of last chapter's plot twist? The Exile's really messing the quest up with her flyaway emotions, isn't she? Also, I'm surprised that no one so far has noticed the geeky joke inherent in her surname._


	21. Infinity

XXI

**4,000 BBY**

Mira met Atton at the ramp of his small ship. He had gotten the _Free Mynock _from a junk-and-ships dealer, and true to form it released bluish smoke into the fresh air of Dantooine, but could be trusted to get him where he needed to go, and, at least, since the modifications he had bought had been installed, to do it in a decent amount of time.

The venerable Jedi institution had been reconstructed for the rebuilt Order, mostly using the pay that the Exile had received in military decorations and salary since her days as a general. It was obvious that the Republic itself was financially stricken in the wake of war—one wing of the enclave was still decrepit, rubble stretching across what had once been a round, pristine courtyard. Walls had broken physically and in the minds of the residents; Atton had been allowed to land in a field just across the short bridge from the enclave. Council Member Shan had made it clear that the Jedi didn't advocate unauthorized landings, just haste.

A green flag snapped in violent wind at the top of one of the two gray towers, whipped by a gust that also sent dark clouds scooting over the usually immaculate sky. The wind flared the edges of Mira's brown cloak out from her Jedi uniform and trim body. She wore the uniform loosely, unlike the grab Atton remembered her preferring, but the cut of her red hair was identical to as it had been, as was her attitude.

"Where've you been, Rand?" She said, in lieu of a welcome.

"Making money. You?"

"Not making money." The former bounty hunter smiled. "But it's kindof nice to settle down. Not have to watch your back all the time. Sometimes I travel around the galaxy to recruit more Jedi. I put my skills to use." She turned and began to walk toward the enclave.

Atton followed. "You have a master, now?"

"Master Shan. 'Teacher' would be a better term for the rank, really. She sits on the Council; I think you knew that."

"I talked to her briefly when I told them I was coming here."

He could not think of what else to say once silence settled; they passed through a sliding door into a simple, sloping passageway. Even though after Anna left he had not desired to join the organized Jedi, he could not help but be impressed at how they had risen from the ashes and seriously begun to gain members and lore again. The odds against them had been great.

He sensed the Council before he saw them. Four people with serious, concentrated minds, the Force swirling around them, resonating out, advertising to anyone with the power to recognize it—these individuals could not be distracted or broken easily. In his past life he would not have balked at interrogating one of them, but he would've cracked an extra joke or two to his Sith employers to make himself feel ready.

They were powers, just like the Exile was, and he found himself hoping that he could trust them with the confusing information he was here to reveal. So often people lied, and Jedi were supposed to be paragons of truth and justice.

But Atton Rand was not an idealist. He did not want to be preached to about how he ought to join the Order, although he was considering it. Being a pilot for hire was so anticlimactic after the adventures with Anna and the others, so…lonely. He would not, though, let the Jedi Council see that desire first.

And so he thought it lucky that the sight of Bastila Shan pushed most deep thoughts out of his mind. She was a striking woman, with intense brown eyes and a smooth, oval face framed by brown hair. She did not wear the traditional Jedi uniform, but rather an outfit which both clung and draped; Atton twisted his expression into a smile that he hoped was not tainted with lasciviousness and irony. He knew that she was one of Revan's Masters, Mira's Master, a war hero, and his contact, but little more.

The other person in the room whom he recognized was crimson-cowled Visas, who stood at the edge of the half-circle-shaped room. The Council member nearest her was also a woman, one whose blonde hair was wrapped around her head in tight braids. The fact that she wore blue and green Mandalorian armor under her brown robe surprised Atton until, knowing well the alliance between Anna and Mandalore, he thought that it was not so strange that a Force-user from the warrior culture would come to the Jedi Order.

Beside the Mandalorian sat an alien whose blue tendrils, flatter than a Nautolan's, ran the length of its humanoid body and widened at the hips, forming a sort of natural skirt in addition to its tan pants. Atton could not determine its gender, but based on human characteristics he guessed male. Its eyes were closed in the azure, humanoid face. The man seated on Master Shan's other side was also an alien, a green-skinned Twi'lek who wore typical Jedi garb. Mira bowed to the Council, and Atton gave them an awkward-feeling nod.

"Welcome," said Master Shan, meeting his eyes without hesitation. "You say that you have a message from Master Sacul…who usually sits on this Council. Where is she, Atton Rand?"

He answered immediately. "With Revan." She sounded accusing. _Or maybe_, thought Atton, _I just expect her to sound that way. _"The short message I received said that they're both in the future. But behind them, it looked like a ruin. Rock walls."

"Who else was there besides Master Sacul?"

"A young man, white clothes, blonde hair. And a brown-haired woman. And _Anna._ I don't think I saw Revan but I'm not sure I'd recognize her either if she was wearing white and a blaster instead of the black and mask deal."

"Gwen's hair is black," Bastila confirmed. "What did Master Sacul say to you, exactly?"

"That they're in the future. And that Rakatan technology sent them there. That's all I got."

"Then they must've been in a ruin," said the Twi'lek. "Just like the ones near here."

Bastila nodded. Her expression turned pensive, and Atton was certain that she was thinking over whatever she knew of the ancient species. Her silence told him that she wasn't making any connections that would be useful.

The blue alien said, "Infinity."  
Atton looked at him. "Hmm?"  
"On my homeworld, there is a vall_ee_y named Infinit_ee_y." On the long _e _sound the alien's throat produced a high-pitched shriek. "Rumors persist of men walking in and coming out a y_ee_r later, wondering why their p_ee_ople are nowhere to be found—why they've moved on. R_ee_ras are nomads; w_ee_ do not stay in one place for long. Supposedly, those stricken by Infinit_ee_y find a new group until they can regain communication with their own, but they cannot explain where they have been. The vall_ee_y has been closed for many y_ee_rs, since a shaman who we now think had a rudimentary knowledge of the Force d_ee_clared the place unnatural."

The Twi'lek asked, "But are there Rakatan ruins?"

"There are structures; a cave, and a decorated wall."

"Master Fnaa," said Bastila. "Can you find images of this valley?"

"I will n_ee_d to contact M'rytlil, my homeworld. But Infinity has likel_ee _been documented."

"Then contact them" said Bastila. "Try to get us a picture." She looked at the other Council members, gaze sweeping across Atton's like a searchlight too high to touch him. "Is that our only lead? Does anyone else know anything about Force time travel?"

The Mandalorian, the Twi'lek, and Visas shook their heads. Visas spoke then, loudly. "I find the concept…hard to believe. The Force can do much. But time is fixed, it is a line…does the Force truly transcend that flow?"

"Not all cultures see time as a line." Mira interjected. "Not all scientists do. It's mysterious. We've never been able to really know what it is."

Silence reigned in the chamber, broken only by the shuffling of robes as people shifted and the Reera walked out. Atton crossed his arms and resisted impatiently tapping a foot. "So, what else can we do about this? Anything?"

"Wait for more messages," Bastila replied.

"This doesn't feel right." Atton said.

"No it doesn't," snapped the Mandalorian. She stared into his eyes, as if she had already pinned down his personality, determined that he would try to work against or independently from the Council, and made it her mission to stop him in a way he would be sure to understand. _Or maybe_, he thought, _Mandalorians just look like that all the time. _"But we will do all we can to research. And you, Atton Rand…you know that you could stay here, for more than just the duration of this mission. The Force is strong with you."

He said, "Yes, I know," as Mira stifled a chuckle behind her hand. _Blast it all, she wanted me to be caught! _

_I shouldn't have a reason not to stay here. I've already been a Jedi for two years, judging by my actions and, er, most of my thoughts. I'm a good guy now. They aren't staring at me, hating me, not forgiving my crimes._

"Anna also knows." Visas said, giving off the same sort of amusement that Mira had. Atton hated living with women who could read his mind.

He glanced at Bastila, then looked at where the Miraluka's eyes should have been. "If Anna chose Mical over me, I don't particularly care what she thinks about my life choices now. But bringing people back from the future sounds important; I may stick around to see how it goes."

Mira smirked. "Welcome to the Order."

Boot heels clicked on the hallway outside and the Reera councilmember returned, holding a datapad. Everyone's attention switched to him. "I put in a call to my brother and got this from a local newsfeed." He depressed a button and a hologram blossomed into the air above the datapad, focusing as he walked into the center of the room. Atton murmured to Mira.

"Aren't Jedi not allowed to see their brothers?"

"They usually aren't. But you use everyone you can get when rebuilding a group that was almost decimated."

The holo showed a circular slab of rock set against a wall. The image was overshadowed by a half-circle of darkness, probably because the photographer was standing in the cave Master Fnaa had mentioned. On the plaque was inscribed the figure-eight mathematical symbol for infinity, one lobe colored in black, one in white. Above it sat a blue crystal larger than any diamond one would set in a ring.

"That isn't enough," said Bastila imperiously. "Is there no other architecture around? Walls in the tunnel, or something, or other symbols?"

"This is all."

"I can't tell whether it's Rakatan or not."

"Perhaps we should do more research," said the Twi'lek. "Keep this in mind, but search for other possibilities. Surely the archives which were preserved beneath this temple and elsewhere may be able to help us, even if it will take some time to excavate them."

"Meanwhile," the Mandalorian said, "Master Sacul and Master Bolwyn are up against the unknown in an unknown time!"

"It didn't look like they were up against anything." Atton clarified. "They looked safe."

"They have always taken care of themselves before," said Visas, "and we can make no moves yet without further information, not even on the Reera's planet. Either way, we need to take some time."

"I hope we have it," Atton murmured.

"Meanwhile," Mira said, loud enough so that he voice barely carried to the council members, "We can see how you're doing with your Jedi powers."

"_Force_ powers," he clarified, uncertain even as he spoke about why he declined to attribute his training under Anna to a side. "And I think they're doing just fine."

"What with you not having practiced in years?" Mira retorted.

"You want to see what I can do?"

Mira smiled. "I do." It was a challenge disguising a polite invitation to stay.


	22. Uncertainty

XXII

The canyon ran to the horizon, but not toward Gwen, and so Anna and Bao-Dur eschewed it in favor of the trackless, tumbled rocks around it. Anna reached out to a handhold, a fluted out-jut of onyx rock. Her toes slipped off of the narrow ledge she had been using as a foothold, and she dug in with the tread of her boots, clutching the vertical rock wall. She recovered her balance, but pebbles and flakes of rock bounced down the sheer slope. Some small stones clattered against the horns of the single, buried merk on the ground far below. It shifted, sensing the movement which alerted it to prey, but single-mindedly focused on concealment and became still again.

The ground flattened out just above Anna's current position. She pulled herself up nearer to the next handhold, almost able to see over the top of the cliff. Then a rock shelf beneath her gave way, and a sick sense of vertigo engulfed her as she tried to lunge forward and up—

She fell into the curve of Bao-Dur's arm; he held her against the wall as she regained her grips, holding himself only by his footholds and the energy-arm which glowed faintly in her peripheral vision. "Almost there, General."

She scrambled up onto the top of the cliff, away from him. She exuded gratitude to him through the Force, but lay on the flat ground in silence as he climbed up beside her. He sat down farther from the cliff than she had. Behind him, a few gray-barked trees sprouted from land less severe and less rocky than that which they had already traversed. Bao-Dur surveyed the landscape, deep breaths flexing through him. She rested a limp hand on her hip and gathered Force energy to her, replacing what the trek had taken.

And she thought that the silence wasn't right. She should thank her apprentice for likely saving her life, but didn't, because what she really wanted to say was 'I love you'.

He was so much more _physical _than Mical, in terms of how she thought of him. Maybe it was because Bao-Dur worked with his hands, while Mical's priority was thought or knowledge. Perhaps it was because he was alien that his touch lingered on her? To see a Zabrak was to see someone both strikingly and subtly inhuman. The little she knew of their culture intrigued her. They associated themselves with tattoos, with artistry forged in pain, that ran along the lines of the face as if the skin had been lifted to reveal muscle striations beneath.

Visceral undertones inspired love in her? In him? Was that why the fight, the chaotic, feral cling to survival, had brought them to this silent moment?

If so, what now? _Is this the dark side? This indecision is new to me. _Fighting the Sith Lords had demanded many times that she choose a side, light or dark, choose which teacher to follow. She'd had companions relying on her, as she did now. So why did she feel so alone here, so disassociated from the galaxy?

"No," said Bao-Dur gently. 

"What?" She sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees, looking straight forward instead of at him, tired of sitting on rocks.

"I don't think that anger links us. The fact that we fought together only matters a little." He sounded confidant, secure. "I have tried to distance myself from the wrath we felt during the war. I have had to forgive myself for the destruction of two fleets and a planet, which I caused, and for the destruction of you." He moved with a clattering of small stones and rested his hands on her shoulders. "My machine separated you from the Force." She started to speak of how she had given the command to activate the Mass Shadow Generator as surely as he had designed it, but he did not stop to let her. "I have had to forgive myself, and you. You must forgive yourself."

Such a Jedi sentiment. _Let go of regrets. _

"You did great amounts of good by resisting Kreia," he continued, "by defeating the Sith Lords. The Force does not condemn you. Your students and friends do not condemn you, or remember your mistakes more vividly than your goodness. They do not condemn my actions at Malachor. I have been forgiven and forgotten, largely because you, who remembered best of all, let me have my niche and be useful to the crew. And you did not hide, but instead took the spotlight. You took the heroic mantle of a Jedi who thought she was the last one in the galaxy. You gave yourself new history."

She let his softly spoken words settle around her, as close and sharp as pebbles. _Forgive myself. _What an alien concept. _I can barely expect to, if I can't forgive _Atton.

_I wish I could see him again._

_Isn't that a kind of forgiveness?_

She turned and embraced Bao-Dur, softly laughing. "I love you," she released, not caring whether she meant it platonically or romantically. He sat up straighter to support her, ran a hand down her back. He spoke no reply, but his Force presence remained as calm and kind as ever. She murmured, "What do I do now, Bao? Go back to Gwen?"

For a few moments he did not give an answer. Then, "I would support that decision."

She drew away, looking up at the sun's yellow corona and feeling its heat through the strong weave of her clothing. Like a radar screen in her head, the Force let her almost unconsciously plot a trajectory back to Revan. Gwen was working her way across the hills, in search of her lost crewmember, accompanied by bright-burning Skywalker.

Bao-Dur stood and extended a hand toward her, smiling a little. She took the proffered hand and let him lift her from the ground, let him walk her on the path she had planned. He brushed against her, bent close to her so that she could hear whispered words. "I never thought that I would love you." He said. "But I have been surprised."

She sustained the touch of her arm lightly against his as they walked through short grass. 

"But Mical," he said.

Anger flared in her. Did Bao-Dur think that Mical mattered, when it was not he who was a warm presence by her side? There would be time to worry about that later, when he returned from his mission, when Anna had healed a bit more with Bao-Dur's and Gwen's help. But now she lived for the moment, and knew that the Force bond she had created with all of her crewmembers kept him swayed to her opinion, kept his eyes locked on her now that a step had been taken in that direction. Although it was callous manipulation and she knew it, to let her powers run free like this, it also felt right. What could be dark about love?

"Can we talk about this later?" she asked, more plaintively than she had planned.

He nodded, then looked away, profile stark and alien against the light, the smooth curve of his skull disrupted by the hooked horns. She thought him beautiful. 

"Alright, General," he said, head turned just slightly toward her again, and she sensed that he did not want to bring the subject up again either. 

**Khalan Morlin lead **Revan's party onto a narrow path rising into the north-west, through landscapes of rock as humorless as the Zabrak's attempted jokes. He kept up a steady stream of them until Carth went from just not laughing to glaring, at which point Khalan fell silent. Gwen pitied his awkwardness. 

"We'll stop at my house before going into the wild," Khalan said into the silence, nervously glancing over his shoulder a few times at Gwen. "To see my father for a second."

"So," Luke asked, to create a new conversation. "Your father runs this town?"

"Yeah." Khalan sounded disheartened. "He expects me to become the mine overseer—the mayor of the town, honestly his title changes depending on who's talking about it, but every one of them respects him—after he can't do it anymore. I'd rather try and make my way in comedy clubs in some city somewhere, and do something different. Everyone is a miner here. But he never let me acquire the skills. I feel so… _different_ from everyone else" 

He fell silent, as they turned a corner around a boulder. A lawn stretched from the path at his feet, which abruptly turned to the left to run alongside the grass for a while until it dipped into the gray, strewn-rock landscape again. At the top of the slope of coarse, pine-green grass sat a one-story house with a gray roof and white walls whose paint chipped away from the flowstone beneath. A speeder and what was probably a defunct mining droid sat on the lawn to the left, the latter with a yard-long furrow dug into the grass behind it, as if its repulsors had given out on one side before it fell to its current and possibly final resting place. On the right, nearer the newcomer's position, a stream about a hand span wide and trickling with gray-tinted water flowed from behind the house, across the path, and into a ravine between two sharp rocks. Also to the right of the house's front door sat a leathery-skinned Zabrak of probably fifty standard years, to whom Khalan jogged to. The boy said, "Father."

The older Zabrak's skin was nearer a shade of gray than his son's was. He wore a blue jacket with a label sewn to the front, probably proclaiming his name but written in a script that Gwen had to take a moment to read. _Danik Morlin_, it said in Iridonian. Danik had high cheekbones, gray-green eyes, and a scarred chin. In one hand he held a rough, black rock the size of his palm, while the other hand was hung over the edge of his plastic chair's armrest. Unlike his son he sported only a small tattoo, a blue half-sunburst at the corner of his left eye.

"Look, father. These are travelers." Khalan said. He spoke in Iridonian Zabrak, and again Gwen had to think hard and use the Force a bit, but she understood the words. Languages had always been easy for her, perhaps because she knew they could be so useful to a traveler, or a conqueror. "They asked me to help find some missing people on the trails."

"That's fine," said Danik amiably. His voice was baritone. "Be back before dark."

"Yes sir. Listen…they're from all over the galaxy." This was said in Basic. He lowered his voice, as if ashamed to continue an old argument. "They make their way, do whatever they want."

"Not necessarily," said Gwen with an admonishing tone, afraid that she knew where this conversation was going, but Khalan continued.

"I could go with them—"

"No." said Carth firmly. All eyes turned to him; he spoke to a place between Khalan and Danik. "We're ex-military. Our lives are dangerous. There's no room for another person."

"Mining is dangerous—" Khalan protested.

"Carth is right," Gwen said to him, exuding kindness. "The way we live…Mine tunnels aren't sentient and out to kill you like our enemies are." She got the frightened reaction from the elder Morlin that she had wanted, although no more than a twitch showed on his craggy face. "We did not choose this lifestyle, either. We'd like peace, and stable homes. I'm afraid you're going to stay here, Khalan."

His hope faded. Disappointment swept over Gwen from him, but like his father he did not show it outwardly. Instead, he simply looked up at her, a few inches only making distance between their heights, and gritted his teeth for a second. "I'll show you the way up the mountains now." 

"Thanks for supporting the idea of him having some sense," said Khalan's father in Basic, and as the three men around her began to walk away Gwen hesitated before him, seeing the shiny, finger-sized runnels worn in the raw stone he held in his calloused hands. He worried for his son, she sensed. He knew exactly how unequipped Khalan was, and that home was safe. She nodded, a tiny bow of concession. "You're welcome." She tried for something to say, some advice to give or another hobby of Khalan's that she knew which she should suggest he focus on. But she had no ideas, and the miner was content, his moment of terror passed. The starfarers were not going to steal his child away.

Gwen turned and walked to join her party. Silently they moved on up the path, away from the grass, the trees, and the pleasant sound of running water. Unexpectedly, Khalan's disappointment was matched by a sadness from Luke. She made a mental note to ask him about it later; if it were any sort of pity or empathy, it might be embarrassing, or awkward, for the Zabrak. And, she thought, right now she needed to think about Anna.

The Exile's and the engineer's Force presences neared as Gwen traveled through the winding paths in the mountains. Sometimes the trails were level, sometimes canted, but always planned and maintained well; however, there was such a maze of them, with so many branching routes, that she was eternally grateful to Khalan for the decisions he made at every fork. 

Finally he brought them to the peak of a mountain. To the left, the ground fell away gently in another grassy lawn, this one devoid of any sign of habitation; lazily the grass trembled in the slight wind. From below the horizon of this sloping meadow, Anna and the engineer appeared, walking confidently side-by-side.

Gwen had readied herself for the meeting; she smiled as they appeared, and walked toward Anna as if to welcome her back to a group who had simply become separated from her. The two women clasped hands, Anna's grip a bit limp in Gwen's firm one. The former Exile's Force sense was reserved, tangled up with emotions of fear and with love. Gwen knew that a deeper relationship had been formed between Anna and Bao-Dur, and the circumstances surrounding it left her unsettled.

"I'm glad we found you," Gwen said. 

"Glad to be back." Anna subtly surveyed Luke, Carth, and Khalan; then she focused her soft gaze on Gwen. She spoke softly, almost a whisper. "I'm sorry."

The Force said, _and yet I cannot be, because my decisions are part of who I am._

"Talk to me more later, if you wish," Gwen said, bending close to the younger woman, trying to appear confiding and wise. She hoped that was the attitude which would not birth any resentment in Anna.

Anna nodded. 

"Welcome back," Gwen said, equally amiably, to Bao-Dur; he nodded, a fraction of a bow, and then met the eyes of Khalan, on the other side of the group. The younger Zabrak edged forward between Carth and Luke, looking at Bao-Dur with some confusion.

"Yes?" said the engineer.

"I don't mean to be rude," Khalan said nervously. "but, the way your tattoos are done. Carved, as well as inked. That's not…It's unique. That's not done any more. It's characteristic of…ancient history."


	23. In Starships

A/N: _This chapter was edited after the wise council of Jen DeClan._

XXIII

The silver, sterile corridors of the Star Destroyer reminded Boba Fett of Tipoca City. However, the comparison did nothing to make him feel at home, and nor did he feel that he needed such reassurance. He was only here for money.

Darth Vader was not going to meet him on the bridge, in the public eye, today. Instead, Fett followed a pair of stormtroopers to a door. A silvery sensor plate adhered to the doorframe passed a scanning light over Fett's proffered and bared hand before the door opened. When he stepped through, the stormtroopers marched stiffly away down the corridor from which they had come.

Why, Fett idly wondered, was Vader spending so much time on board ship? The Rebellion, or something else, was commanding his attention, keeping him on his toes and away from Imperial Center.

Perhaps this entire warship, or an entire fleet, was for the _Ebon Hawk_.

He dampened down his speculation as he passed through a dimly lit corridor which led to his destination, a small meeting room. His were not the mind-techniques of the Jedi, but he was a naturally focused man. Vader would at least be certain that Fett was paying attention.

The meeting room contained a small viewport, a round table, a few false-leather chairs, Darth Vader, and a hologram of the hooded Emperor Palpatine. When Fett entered, he nodded to both Imperials. He did not audience with the leader of the known galaxy often and did not know the proper procedure, but his confidence allowed him to begin at the least deferential of polite entrances. The emperor would demand more, subtly or threateningly, if he wished it, and Fett was sure to be attuned to the more subtle signs. If the emperor wanted formality and did not get it, Force powers or financial ruin could shortly follow.

Instead, Palpatine coldly said, "Good afternoon, Boba Fett."

"Emperor." Fett gave a slightly deeper bow this time.

"You have succeeded in capturing Solo?" Vader's voice rumbled like the underbelly of a starship.

"I have," Fett replied. "I delivered him to Jabba."

"That was not your only mission," the emperor croaked. "What have you found out about his companions' goals?"

Fett took a battered, spherical object from a pouch at his belt and held it out to Vader. "I got audio of a conversation that sounded quite important."

Vader took the device and slotted it into a port on the table without a word. A hologram sprouted from the tabletop, showing grass—the recording device appeared to be sitting on the ground—and a sliver of sky. Nothing moved but the blowing grass and flying manta-shapes in the distance, but there was audio indeed. Fett and the Imperials heard their underground quarry expressing amazement about the ruins. A ysalamir crawled across the grass, filling the picture with its yellow hide. The voice called a Rakatan issued from the Star Map and told of science, prophecy, and planets on which the crystals of power were hidden.

When the recording finished, just before Fett had dropped down into the room, the bounty hunter looked at Darth Vader. There was a moment of silence before the Dark Lord spoke.

"This technology could be valuable," Vader mused.

"I would be loath to believe it," Palpatine began. "But we should not underestimate this Darth Revan woman. I researched her and her companions." An ugly, gleeful smile lit his face with a nacreous glow. "The fate of Anna Sacul, in her own time, is… interesting. You can search for these crystals, Vader. Meet the intruding ship at the planet M'rytlil. They will go there last. It is a world which has been closed to outsiders for many annals of history. The name it goes by on our charts is not that which it went by in Revan's time."

Vader bowed his canine mask. "I will monitor that planet imminently. Should warships be deployed there?"

The emperor was silent and pensive for a moment, and then returned to his former glib mien, which slightly unsettled Fett. If a man were to conduct business of war, he thought, he ought to be serious about its import. "That is acceptable," Palpatine croaked. "Be subtle, Lord Vader. Do not underestimate your opponents, especially if Luke Skywalker is with them."

The hologram flicked off, and Fett moved to take the recording device out of the port. Vader reached a threatening hand toward him to prevent that action. "I will save this recording here."

Slowly, angrily, Fett pulled his own gauntleted hand away, stubbornly maintaining eye contact from one mask to another. He thought of asking how Vader could believe this time travel nonsense, but it seemed that the emperor and this Darth Revan's acceptance of it made that a moot point. Equally strange things, Fett supposed, had been commonplace in the lives of the Jedi.

What could Fett himself do if power over time were given to him? He could go back to Geonosis, the name which had not lurked in his mind for so long. Would he stand on the same ground as his younger self, and be able or unable to change the event of his father's death? What would change in the present if he tweaked that one moment in the past?

But there was no use in dwelling on it. He would never have his hands on the needed technology. He had high-end weapons to buy and acquaintances to brag to now that Han Solo was a feature of Jabba the Hutt's décor.

The rudest Fett could be to the two Imperials was to walk out the door without another word.

**Vader almost laughed**, when finally he was alone. This issue with the rogue ship had given him access to Star Destroyers for his personal use. He would certainly deal with Revan, and, hopefully, with Luke, whose conversion was becoming less and less likely the more time he spent in the company of experienced Jedi. But first, Vader needed to rid himself of a different enemy.

Prince Xizor, despot, crime lord, and all-around son of a kath hound, had been steadily gaining favor with the emperor over the last few months. Vader needed to win back some power for himself, and blasting Xizor out of existence in the Falleen's own skyhook would certainly achieve that goal.

There were subtler ways, but Vader was tired of them.

He approached the center table, then depressed a button for the comm.. "Captain," he boomed.

"Lord Vader." His subordinate's voice was crisp, the audible version of a salute so perfect that it revealed the man's fear of failure.

"Plot a course toward Imperial Center, captain."

"And abandon our current course and scanning toward the world M'rytlil, Lord Vader?"

"We are fighting on multiple fronts. Do it, captain. When we are in proximity, contact me."

"Yes Lord Vader."

He released the button.

He had not often imagined anything as vividly as he imagined the debris of Xizor's favorite home, disintegrating down into the red-flaring atmosphere, bouncing off other buildings' shields. More lasers would pour in. The coruscating city and citizens would be appeased by tales of Rebel activity.

Afterward, Vader could deal with the _real_ Rebel activity.

**The walls of **Mical's room were not soundproof. Nor, he realized after a moment of barest lucidity, were his blanket and pillow.

So he threw off the blankets, thoroughly prepared to tell whoever was doing all that shouting and moving of things that he was going to throw them off the _Hawk_.

His bare foot slipped on something flat and he was pulled back into the present, into his datapad-and flimsi-strewn room on the Rebel ship. The commotion in the planning room down the hall felt like a plea for help in the Force.

Mical had been allowed to use whatever resources the individual members of the Rebellion would trust him with. Princess Leia had been invaluable, Wes Janson, who had given him an entirely false news article about a species called Gungans creating the universe four thousand years ago, less so. Mical knew enough social-political history now to extrapolate upon the rise and role of the Empire.

The Force flurried, riled up by the emotions of Princess Leia and Wedge Antilles.

Mical got out of bed, changed into brown pants from the white ones he had slept in, and ducked into a white tunic. He belted the tunic and slid his feet into his boots before walking out into the white hall.

The planning room was in an uproar when he arrived. People pointed at high, clear tactical screens that distorted their faces. A handful of Rogues, visible by their vivid orange flightsuits, some inside out around their hips revealing the tight black shirts beneath, stood against a wall. Their sleepy minds and disheveled uniforms attested to the fact that they too had been surprised by a wakeup call.

As soon as Mical got a few steps into the room, Princess Leia appeared at his side. She spoke in a rush. "We registered major troop movements, not toward us—toward the Core." Her force of personality and impetuous pulled him across the room, as firmly as a hand. She stopped in front of one of the transparisteel boards.

She bent close to the bright lines. "Where," she murmured, "Are they going?"

"We've got clearer intel here, princess," reported a bearded Rebel to Leia. "A capitol ship and change, weapons ready, passed the most Coreward jump transfer point that we're watching."

Mical realized, "It could be the _Hawk_."

"Hmm?" Leia' sharp jawline tipped toward him.

"They could be pursuing the _Ebon Hawk_."

"Capitol ships for your one?" The Rebel technician said in surprise.

"Sure—"

Leia said, "Luke is with them." She looked up. "Wedge!"  
Wedge Antilles hurried to her, combing calloused fingers through his black hair.

"Is your team doing anything important right now? Missions?"

"Lazing, princess. Your wish is my command."

She jabbed a finger at the tactical board. "Find out what these Imp ships are doing. Be as invisible as possible."

"Yes ma'am." He straightened and gave a loose salute before mentally shaking himself, waking up, and going to rouse his squadron.

_I cannot go with them_, Mical told himself. _My room is strewn with files unread, and Leia has not finished her passive inspection of me. Nor do I have the skills to fly with the squadron._

But he looked at Leia for a moment, and her expression against him was as hard as a face of stone.

"I'm going to call Anna." He said softly, "and find out how my team is doing."

She nodded, and continued to trace the bright lines, and to speak in coordinates to the tech.

He slipped away through the crowd.


	24. Revelations and Awkward Silences

XXIV

Khalan stared at Bao-Dur, his shoulders hunched, while the placidity he received in return both weakened and returned his intensity.

'No,' Gwen whispered to Bao-Dur's mind, a sensation of command instead of distinct words. 'Don't tell.' The travelers' identity ought to be kept quiet, just above the level of a lie.

"It was the choice of my family," Bao-Dur said.

"Thank you so much for helping us," Gwen said to Khalan, hands clasped demurely before her. "We do need to get going."

He hesitated for a moment, then turned and led them back down the path. He walked beside Gwen, and in a few moments, spoke as she knew he would. "I want to go with you."

She thought about her words before replying. "I understand that you want a different life. But our life…it is hard. We're soldiers, most of us, trained for war. It wouldn't be a good place for you."

"Do you think this is a good place for me?" the Zabrak exclaimed.

"You aren't content," Carth said, "because you're young. No, hear me out. Next year or whenever you'll buy your own speeder. Go places, expand your horizons, see what people do outside your town. Find a niche for yourself. It'll feel natural."

Khalan's mouth twitched. "Heh. Right." His disappointment cut through the Force, all the more pointed because of its carefully controlled exterior.

But Gwen did have other things to think about. The augmented navicomputer had indicated that there should be a Rakatan crystal ensconced in this area. Mountains full of precious metals made it likely that the crystal had been mined—or that the Rakatans would have put it in a place unlikely to be found by anyone who was not specifically looking for it. Maybe it wasn't underground at all. What else would have lasted for thousands of years? Something one would have to be looking for to find?

Then she remembered, and saw—a triangle of rock on the path to the town, Leshae. Two jagged shards crossed over a glacial, incongruous, round boulder. It hulked beside the path, just one more odd geological feature of the landscape. Gwen nudged the boulder with the Force, gestureless, as the group passed it.

She said, "Look at that."

As the stone shifted the atmosphere of the group did too, turning them from serious questers to casual sightseers. Heads turned to track the movement. Luke stopped and curiously moved toward the cave created by the boulder's movement. Khalan reacted second, dashing in front of Luke as if to protect him. But Gwen stepped in front of the young man.

_This might be dangerous,_ she projected into his mind. _It's of little import_, she told them all, _but I need to investigate._

She slipped inside the small cave formed between two parts of the stone structure. The red cloth over her hips hit the rock wall uncomfortably in the narrow entrance, dislodging small pebbles and dust to add to the cloud formed by the shifted boulder.

The crystal, set six claustrophobia-inducing paces inside the tiny cave, faintly glowed from the inside before Gwen snatched it up. Quickly she left the cave and returned to the group to say "Nothing interesting in there. Just a shallow cave. We should move on." The ones who weren't mindtricked understood the significance.

She pressed the crystal between Carth's hand and her own for a second before slipping it into a pocket.

They kept walking. Again an upwelling of emotion from Luke seemed to match Khalan's earlier one, and Gwen reminded herself to ask him about it later.

At the ramp of the _Ebon Hawk_, Gwen clasped Khalan's hand. She pulled the boy close, and murmured, "I'm sorry." Not every fate was meant to be galaxy-spanning, but his disappointment saddened her, just as Dustil's disappearance had.

It was with a heavy heart that she mounted the ramp, half-listening to the other goodbyes her crewmembers gave their temporary guide.

She made her way to the cockpit and took the copilot's seat, joined a moment later by silent Carth. He set the engines to whirring beneath their feet, pulled the straps of crash webbing over his shoulder, keyed on the lights which warned of the takeoff. He asked, "What's on your mind?"

After a moment of working with the navicomp, she replied flippantly. "It's just that urge to help everyone I meet. I don't like leaving someone behind if he wants to come, even if Khalan is not exactly party-member quality." The horizon tipped and disappeared. Gwen eased the lever forward to engage the sublights.

He sighed, and then spoke the truth through a screen of kind understatement which he did not entirely wish to break. "He was not an able-bodied soldier. Everyone we met who lives here now _was,_ in their own way. Mission was self-reliant; she had skills we needed. Old Jolee was a Jedi. Khalan didn't have any skills. That we need." The sky turned from blue to black as he stifled a smile.

Gwen mused, "I wonder where Jolee is…"

"Aren't I right? I don't want you to feel bad about this."

After a moment, the Force breathing in and out of her like calming air, she replied. "I won't dwell." She linked the navicomp to the galaxy map, coordinates for Duros scrolling onto the screen beside her hands. "Ready to jump."

Stars all around, Carth spread his fingers across the levers which would activate the hyperdrive.

Gwen watched her screen."Now."

He pulled back. The engine revved and stars stretched. The _Ebon Hawk _slipped off the plane of the universe, leaving Carth and Gwen sitting silent beside one another in the tunnel of hyperspace.

She looked away from the stars and her own thoughts as Luke entered the room. He crossed his arms over the gray-and-white light armor he had bought along the way and leaned casually against the bulkhead. He looked at Gwen. "I understand."

"What do you understand?" She brushed a strand of blue-black hair away from her eyes as she turned in her chair to look at the younger Jedi.

"I didn't want to leave Khalan behind either. I was just like him, a few years ago. I wanted to get off my planet so badly, and luckily enough I did. A Jedi found me…"

"But you had skills!" Carth insisted. "You could pilot, and the Rebellion needs you for that, isn't that the story? Are you werea Jedi-in-training."

"So," Gwen snapped, "Force sensitivity instantly gives someone a destiny?" _I guess you turned _that _down._

Luke almost flinched. "I don't want to intrude on a private conversation—"

"It's okay," Carth held up a hand, eyes narrowed. "That's not what I meant. You, you're a warrior. You have warrior blood. We don't _need_ a comedian who isn't even good at comedy. Do you think I want to see him killed? That's what would happen. We can't train him from nothing to survive with us."

Gwen nodded. Carth was right about that. Leaving Khalan on Iridonia may very well have saved his life.

Luke quietly said, "Warrior blood?"

.

**There was a **message waiting for Anna when she entered the common room. A green light blinked on the central computer. When she asked it to display who had called, unknown coordinates and Mical's name appeared on the screen.

Mission, Zaalbar, and others tramped through the common room, but suddenly Bao-Dur's presence shined frighteningly bright in her mind. She felt her face flush.

Of course, he knew. Of course, he moved to stand beside her and spoke, picking up on her distress. "What is it?"

"Mical."

He walked away, out of kindness, not spite—sadness mixed with longing trailed his thoughts. She pressed 'play' before she decided not to.

Mical appeared in hand-high, bluish, holographic form, looking clean and composed as always. "Anna," he said. "I'm doing fine here, organizing the documents we've been able to find. But, disconnected from my work entirely—we were notified that a fleet of Imperials is pushing toward the Core. I don't know if you're involved or not, or if you're headed toward it. I hope you're safe." His voice softened then, changing from professional to personal as he voiced what he had always before said through the Force alone. "I love you."

His shyness almost touched her.

She lost herself in memory of him for a moment, then in frightened speculation. What would Bao-Dur think? That rage could be turned…but she mentally shook herself. Revan needed to know about the fleet movements.

Anna headed for the cockpit.

**To Gwen's senses**, the Force spiked, opening the poisonous abyss of Luke's revelation.

"How do you know?" Luke said, voice low and controlled after a time of false starts and a stammering in the Force.

"You talk in your sleep," Carth said, inflectionless.

"So the others in the dorm know too?" Luke looked shocked.

Gwen had to ask. "What?"

"No," Carth reassured. "I came inside late one night. I think I was the only one awake to hear you."

"What did I say?"  
Carth glanced at Gwen.

"Go ahead." Luke said. "She knows…enough."

" 'Father'", said Carth. "and 'Vader'. That was most of it, over and over. But…there were pleas. Some of them more…accepting than others." Luke, Gwen thought, ought to be sure to thank Carth for doing what he could to preserve Luke's dignity.

Outside awareness punctuated Gwen's dawning understand. "Anna's in the hallway," she announced quietly.

Luke turned around and did not see her, but then she stepped out of the med room, nervously plucking at the collar of her shirt. "I tried not to hear," she said. "I'm sorry. I have important news, not connected to...this conversation. At all. Mostly." She sighed at her awkward words.

"What did you hear, Anna?" Gwen asked.

"Admiral Onasi said that Luke cried out in his sleep. I heard 'father', and 'Vader', and 'acceptance'."

Luke sighed and gestured for her to come in. Gwen permitted it. Whatever she was, Gwen did not think that Anna was an Imperial spy.

"Vader…" Anna murmured. "is Luke's father?"

And if Anna was anything, she was good at finding and using the connections between people.

"That's true?" Gwen asked quietly.

"Not to channel Atton or anything," Anna said to Luke, "but at least you weren't calling out for your mother."

Gwen couldn't resist barking a laugh, and the corners of Luke's mouth twitched. But "Who knows who my mother is," he said quietly. "Who…Vader…" His eyes looked haunted.

Gwen dragged his gaze up with hers. "Don't dwell, Knight Skywalker. From when we first met, each knew that the other had secrets. Now yours is out, and I can help you. I have a secret too, which yours reflects. I was a Sith Lord once, Darth Revan, thought that name might mean nothing to you. My memory was taken from me and I woke up as a new, normal person. I was re-taught by the Jedi, so that it was appalling to find out what I had once been. I wanted to clean out my heart because of what I had done."

Luke's right hand caught his folded collar nervously. He nodded.

"I felt at first that it must not be true. That I was completely separated from this evil person that I was said to be so close to. I went through guilt, and pain, and finally, if not acceptance, reaction."

Again, a slow nod. Shadows of the close room fell across Luke's jawline and chin. "So what do I do now?"

"Accept. You must have a plan for him and you if you are going to continue to fight the Empire. You are, aren't you?"

"Yes. And I want to turn him to the light side, just as he wants me to turn to the dark."

"Good."

Anna said, "Not to interrupt, but the Rebellion sent a message to us. The Imperials are sending a group of ships toward the Core. Mical—" a quick glance that only Gwen caught because the Exile's bright eyes flashed toward her—"said that they were concerned that the ships were coming for us."

Gwen said, "Thank you. That's good to know."

Carth asked, "If they're not headed for us and the Rebels don't know where they're going, does that affect us?"

"I don't know," Anna replied. "I can call him back."

There was a moment of awkwardness where Anna fidgeted hesitantly toward the doorway; then she departed.

"Does it matter if anyone else knows about my father?" Luke sighed.

"She won't tell," Gwen reassured him. "The more unpredictable she is the more challenging our mission will be. But…don't worry about your secret, Luke."

The Force told of his relief. Gwen's advice had resonated. He would need time to heal, and to be comfortable speaking about it, but a step on that path had been taken. Carth and Luke began to talk, and Gwen settled back in her seat and delved into thoughts of Anna. What to tell her anymore about her conduct, about her relationship with her apprentices? It had gone into the realm of the personal problem. What Gwen could do now was assure that Jedi training continued to take place for all of them. She would not let Anna's lax confusion get herself or one of the crewmembers killed.

_I need to talk to her. Not about turning to the dark side. Just about being immoral and weak and causing her apprentices emotional distress in an already stressful time._

_How am I supposed to phrase that?_

**Anna Sacul tossed **her personal commlink between her hands as she stood next to the computer in the common room. The personal comm wouldn't reach Mical across the stars, but she did not want to have to see him.

She started a return call to the Rebellion before she could change her mind again, rehearsing her formal words in her mind.

He appeared immediately. A table behind him, partly in the view-field, was strewn with flimsy and caf cups. "Hi," he said, with a soft smile.

"We're on our way to the planet Duros. The Empire isn't after us."

"Good," he turned around, seemingly preoccupied with preventing a sheaf of flimsy from sliding off the table. Nervous, Anna parroted the movements and saw what she had feared: Bao-Dur, standing in a doorway and watching her. Fear-pain jolted through her arms like an electric shock over her skin. Was he in the holo's field of view?

Mical spoke to her again. 'I'm glad you're safe." His eyes shone, as if along with the rote relief was the validation of the belief that nothing could harm the Exile. "How's the mission?"  
"We went to Iridonia, and—" _don't think too much, _she commanded herself_—_ "found another crystal."

"Excellent." He lowered his voice and it transformed his face; she was reminded of moments of consolation. His eyes slid away from hers for a moment, over her shoulder, and she was sure that he was seeing a ghostly Bao-Dur lurking behind her; sure that he was seeing her thoughts. He asked, "Are you sure you're alright, Anna?"

"Yes," She bluffed. "I'm just stressed about finding these crystals." Which wasn't a bluff, except that more than anything else she wished that Mical had never left, because surely then it would not feel like he was dogging her steps, like a disapproving parent, now.


	25. Dinner and Destruction

XXV

In the swoop hanger, Bao-Dur's bandoleers and equipment belt clattered to the floor. For a moment Anna thought that he was going to take his shirt off as well, but he didn't; he simply looked at her, unburdened, with a slight smile, and bent to pick up the discarded items. He piled them on a shelf set into the wall while she frantically tried to think of something to say.

It was a task to think of something to say, so the first thought that surfaced was _it's my turn to fix dinner tonight._

It was not a chore, but rather easy and natural, to keep silently watching Bao-Dur. He did not move like Mical; it was care and solidarity, not grace and impetuous, that Bao-Dur personified.

What did he expect? What did the crew expect; what would they feel?

_This blasted inner conflict would be so much easier without Force users around._

But the others didn't matter. Because as soon as she reached for the Force, his need to be with her was there, just like her need for him. _At ease, soldier _floated into and out of her thoughts as a possibility of something to say. She crossed her arms and leaned against the bulkhead. Silence seemed the only option which would not lead to more conversation.

She was tired of conversation, tired of relationships too stressful to be comforting. But Bao-Dur _had _been comforting, when they were alone on the rocks, had been everything.

How could something so critical in Anna's battle against uncertainty be wrong?

Even if it founded _more _uncertainty?

She ghosted away to the prep unit before he could react.

**"What's this?" Admiral **Onasi grunted as she reached to pass a platter of meat over his shoulder. "Boiled gizka?"  
"Sorry, Admiral." She set the tray down on the makeshift table, the central computer. "We were all out of gizka. I think it's fried pockethare."

"You _think_?" Mission asked wryly.

"I just pressed a button and told the galley to defrost the stuff; I didn't take much time to read the labels." Laughs sprouted around the circle. Anna sat down on a folding chair between Bao-Dur and Zaalbar when she had finished setting trays between the crewmember's plates. Food was passed around, clattering and steaming; Anna's stomach growled, although it was a bit queasy from the sight of the very red meat that the prep unit had decided was proper fare for a Wookiee. She speared a piece of spiceloaf, set it in front of her, and found it easy to focus on something besides Zaalbar's plate.

The back of her hand touched Bao-Dur's, stimulating rarely noticed nerves. Watching the hair on her wrist stand up, she compared the colors of their skins. There was a grey shade to his veins which seemed very natural, very suited to his alienness. The tan of her skin was brighter than his, and his skin was warmer, soothing the ridges that ran toward her wrist from her knuckles.

_Focus_, she told herself. _I need to be all right for the Duro mission._

Mission swallowed a forkful of meat and spoke. "So you found the first crystal."

"Yes," Gwen replied, smiling for a moment. "We need more of a plan next time. I was lucky to find that."

"The locations the Star Maps gave us were vague too," Carth said. "But I don't think we're guaranteed that these things will be as untouched as the Star Maps were."

"Duro," said Bao-Dur calmly, "is a very industrialized world. The Mandalorians attacked it a few years ago….a few years before we left our time. They were one of the first species to take to space and invent the hyperdrive." He looked at Luke. "Do you know what it is like now?"

"I'm not sure. I think…I think I remember that it's like Ithor, a bit—no one lives on the surface. There are farms and factories down there, but everyone lives in space stations around it."

"The crystal could be anywhere."

"It could," said Gwen. "We can't trust that we'll find it as…easily, as randomly, as on Iridonia."

"Why not?" Luke interjected. All eyes turned to meet his widened blue ones. "We trusted in the Force, and found help and the crystal. We can trust it again."

Anna broke the resultant moment of silence. "I don't know about you, Master Bolwyn, but when I was looking for the Jedi Masters when I owned this ship I didn't have much of a plan for each planet I visited. I assigned my crewmembers their tasks and then went and looked for information."

"I didn't strategize much either," Gwen replied. "Remember that I lost my memory. I couldn't plan an attack—I was just a soldier, like any of us, determined and uncertain." She set her hand over Carth's, and without much thought about it Anna eased hers away from Bao-Dur.

Luke pulled the subject back to something he understood. "I was in a space battle once, piloting a snubfighter against a battle station the size of a moon. No one could do that on their own—older, wiser pilots than me had tried and _died_. But the Force told me—my Master told me—to let go of worrying and of relying on things, and to just trust the Force. And we won that day, against the Empire."

"You're right." Gwen nodded. Again the small smile. "Strategies are more appropriate for large-scale battles, and can never mesh with the unpredictability of life itself. However, we still need to decide who should go planetside."

"Has anyone been to this planet before?" Bao-Dur asked.

Heads shook around the makeshift table.

"We'll explore then." Gwen said. She ate a bite of food, and Anna finally focused on her own meal. The rest of the mealtime was spent eating.

When dinner was finished, Anna carried the plates back to the galley and set Mission to washing them. ("Don't we have machines for this?" the Twi'lek asked. "Not working at the moment," Anna replied, truthfully.)

Nightshift was approaching, so Anna began to walk back to her dormitory in the wake of Gwen. But in the darkening corridors her eye caught a glow of blue, and she changed direction, making for one of the more labyrinthine corridors below the turret guns.

Bao-Dur was standing near a wall, not unlike she had been doing earlier, except that he wasn't leaning, and he seemed to be waiting…She drew close to him and tucked herself between his side and his living arm, reassured by the smooth response when he circled her with his false arm, cold hand against her waist. She casually wondered whether the energy humming across her stomach was lethal.

**Lasers dove toward **Coruscant. On their heels came TIE fighters, purely for show and to absorb the antiaircraft lasers driving back up the gravity well toward the Imperials. It was the capital ship, the Super Star Destroyer, that was doing the work, looming over the city low enough that the horizon must look flat from it, pounding at the skyhook which floated just beneath the planet's smoggy atmosphere.

Pressed against the back of his seat as his X-Wings landing claws pressed against the barren surface of Coruscant's half-populated first moon, Wedge Antilles watched the battle play out in hologram form on his lap. Lime-green circles, indicators which clashed rather vividly with his orange flightsuit, pointed out the skyhook's defenses.

A comm signal came through from the Rogue in charge of sensors. "That's Prince Xizor's skyhook—he's the leader of Black Sun!"

The Rebellion hadn't had much contact with the galactic underworld—for all they could provide, the criminal organizations of the galaxy did not uphold the values the Rebels did, and were woven tightly in with the Empire like vines around a tree. Wedge could not imagine why this battle was happening now, unless infighting had grown severe and vicious.

_Which wasn't_, he supposed, _too unlikely._

"Should we help out the skyhook, Rogue Leader?" Wes Janson asked.

"No," Wedge replied immediately. "We shouldn't risk twelve of us under those guns for Black Sun. This infighting is an advantage for the Rebellion. We should take it."

"All right, Lead."

On the hologram, Wedge watched a vast flap of the building's metal skin slough off, trailing sparks from the shear edges. Debris and the occasional TIE fighter slammed against Coruscant's shields, sending sparks streaking around them in a sunburst. The rest of the planet would be fine, with its massive shields, and the Empire would of course explain to, if not reimburse, its citizens. This was just one example of the battering fist of the government. This was what he stayed in the Rebellion to fight, these overpowering starships—but he couldn't fight the Imps for Black Sun. It would be putting the Rogues in undue danger.

He sighed with relief that Coruscant as a whole was safe.

He turned the holo-display off, and leaned comfortably forward into where it had been. "Let's move out, Rogues. We'll jump to point B a few systems away and contact the princess, tell her this isn't about us."

_But I wonder if we can take advantage of it. The Empire is vast enough that sending one Super Star Destroyer to another battle wouldn't split their forces in any way that we can use._

Wedge unlocked the landing claws, hearing the gentle thud as they released their hold and folded back into the ship. The Rogues arrayed around him, and they accelerated away.


	26. Jump Again

XXVI

The _Ebon Hawk _slid into existence next to the planet Duro, Carth and Gwen at the helm.

The planet was a quilt of squares: green, yellow, blue and brown patch-working the whole curved surface. The terminator line cut across the middle, and on the dark side noctilucent lights were rare; Gwen saw one circle of yellow globes, like a fairy ring, surely a landing complex in case the vast, lonely network of droid factories needed sentient repair.

The crew had researched this planet on the HoloNet, and so Carth knew to angle the ship toward one of the orbital cities ringing it instead of making for the surface. The cities looked not unlike Ithorian herdships, buildings rising out of a bowl of durasteel and giant repulsor tubes augmented by sublight engines. Sunlight flared off their faceted, gray surfaces.

"Hooking on to a spacelane toward a city above the region the galaxy map indicated," Carth reported.

That, Gwen had learned, was their only possible course of action. No one lived on Duro itself; it was too polluted, and too useful barren.

The space station's skyscrapers rose up around the _Hawk _as it descended on a landing pad in their midst.

**Gwen's choice of **companions to accompany her out of the ship was quick and designed to eliminate emotional impact. She settled a strategists' mein around herself like a cloak, just like Anna had shed her general's one in favor of failing discipline. She pointed at Luke for knowledge of the present, Carth for firepower, and Bao-Dur for Force backup, and marched down the ramp toward the streets of the orbiting city. The three followed before anyone could protest. The one person who lingered at the ramp, leaning against a bulkhead and wringing her hands, was Mission. Gwen paused to meet the Twi'lek's eyes.

"Gwen," Mission asked, "Do you think we're going to see Captain Solo again?"

"Maybe, "was the truthful answer. "Why?"

"He was nice to have around, that's all. We played cards once. He was a good guy."

"Yeah." _I didn't know that you were fond of him, Mission. Maybe you talked to him instead of me? And that's not just self-deprecation. It's something I need to work on. _She turned partly away, tightened her collar against her neck. "I'll be back, Mission." Then Gwen turned away before her friend could, and was swept away into the crowds of the city.

This crew, Gwen knew, needed to hold together. More quietude could increase their comradery, as possibly could more battles; she didn't know the chemistry between all of these soldiers from varied times.

She had only begun to be lonely–for anyone except Carth anyway–when Anna found her on Dantooine. Afterward, when Gwen's thoughts could have returned to her allies, she'd been too occupied with the new, future world–and with Carth–to think about 'family' dynamics. She needed to, when this mission was over, so that her crew was a team more than they were now.

On the fringes of the spaceport, a market spread like a web. Its mein was like that of a gregarious open-air market on a much less technologically advanced world, although girders and transparisteel separated the sky from space above. Plastic tables sat along the sides of the footpath in front of row houses, each manned by a person and piled high with goods. Oval Duros eyes watched over beaded clothes and bags, or datapads and speeder parts. Humans hawked datapads. A Balosar lifted his husky voice in praise of the meat kabobs he held aloft, oil dripping down his hand.

Gwen could not help looking around the market and wondering why they had to land in such a chaotic and possibly disreputable part of the city. Carth gripped her elbow as a group of bald-pated Duros children speaking enthusiastically among themselves in their bubbly voices pushed past the four offworlders, and she thought that he wanted to protect her from pickpockets. But he pointed subtly at the children and laughed at their gregariousness. Luke moved ahead of them, scanning the crowd and then a table. Gwen had walked on a few steps, following Carth's gaze and diluting her stress with his happiness. _He likes children, _she thought, _He is less accustomed to soldiery than I am, even though I would never have guessed he didn't feel more comfortable with it, in the beginning. While I was a Jedi stoic, he had a family. He loved Morgana and Dustil. And I...think I need to know what a love like that is like. _But words could not quite express the feeling that made her lips turn up and her hand slide to Carth's.

"Look!" Luke rushed back to her through the crowd, eyes bright. Awe dropped years from his features. "Look, Master Gwen!" He jogged to a stop in front of her.

"What is it?"

"Look at that!" His voice was loud, but so was the rest of the crowd. He pointed at a nearby table. "Isn't that what we're here for?"

On the table to their right, cheap baubles caught dull light. In front of the transparent models of solar systems hunched plastic decorations in the shape of crystals. Four of the things were pink-tinted and gaudy. The fifth was identical to the shard of technology-infused crystal which Gwen had at her waist in a pouch.

"Is that," she breathed, cutting off her initial skeptic reply, and trailed off.

"It is!" Luke assured her. "I told you the Force would bring us what we needed!"

"Wait." Gwen approached the table, picked up the crystal and met the heavy-lidded eyes of the Duros behind the table. She poked the stone with her nails, felt it solid and cold under the pads of her fingers. Crystal indeed, certainly not plastic.

"Fourteen credits," the Duros burbled in Basic.

"Where did you get this?" Gwen asked it.

"Salvage. All very official suppliers of course. From the surface of our lovely planet. It's genuine rock, not like these other ones." The gray-green hand swept dispassionately over the four false stones.

Gwen thought about it for a moment, then glanced at eager Luke and her silent companions. "I'll take it."

She handed over her money, and was given the crystal in a plastic box. Gwen handed it to Bao-Dur when they had walked a few steps away from the vendor. "Take this to the ship, please," she said. "See if it works with the navicomputer."

"Yes, Master." He received it in cupped, disparate hands, but did not yet move, stalled by the next exchange..

Gwen felt a poke at her shoulder. "Hey." She turned to find the Duros merchant standing at the corner of his table and pulling his hand back from her, purplish gaze lolling between her and Luke. His first word was not Basic, but then he managed, "Isn't he the Rebel boy?"

A Sluissi merchant next to the Duros had fished a datapad out from a pile of them and displayed a wanted poster, issued by the Empire, complete with a blurry image of Luke.

"No," Gwen asserted.

"They say I look like him all the time, though–" Still wide-eyed, Luke stopped speaking in time to backhand a Duros who was approaching him from behind, greed in his sense–

Luke's knuckles struck the alien between its eyes. When it flung out its arms in surprise, the crowd parted too. Shouts rose up as Luke turned, ready for the next attack. But not everyone in the marketplace was in on the sudden grab for fame and bounty money. Gasps and screams cut through the nearby air as the quick Duros fighter punched and Luke blocked close to his own face. People began to mill; and the serpentine, green-skinned Sluissi slithered forward as if to protect his merchandise.

Gwen raised her hands, weaponless but ready to call whatever would send most civilians running in the opposite direction, away from Luke's attackers. Her voice carried. "Official business! Stay calm. Leave this area!" Although whatever the officials were here, they probably weren't human, and most of the Duros were taller than her, some of the members of the crowd heeded her cries and eddied toward side streets. But others gawked, forming a thick circle of living bodies around Luke and his foes.

Both of them were still unarmed. Luke pushed the Duros away ungracefully, the Suissi undulating forward and the second Duros pushing through the unresisting crowd to get closer to them. A group of friends, bound together by greed–

"Bao-Dur!" Luke shouted. "Get back to the ship." Gwen knew exactly what the younger Jedi was trying to say–that the crystal was more important than he was.

Bao-Dur, a good soldier, followed orders and started to jog back toward the spaceport.

"No it's not," Gwen muttered to herself–_ I won't lose one of my family members._ She stepped toward Luke. A moment later new, distinct presences separated themselves from the crowd; intent, firm minds coming her way, and out of the corners of her eye she saw the dull white of stormtrooper armor.

She turned, determined to stop them before they too attempted to detain Luke. Mindtricks would work nicely.

**The Sluissi was **unarmed, but he brought his leathery, flat tail to bear in a slap that whooshed through the air above Luke's head. The Jedi ducked, and scanned the streets for somewhere to run to, finding only one crowded street and a thick-bodied Duros who did in fact have a blaster–_and I don't have a lightsaber!_

He flung the blaster out of the alien's hand with the Force, then hit the Sluissi in the face with it. Luke jumped out of the way of the Sluissi's return and clumsy swing, and put an abandoned wares table between himself and the three opportunistic bounty hunters. The second Duros was scrabbling for the dropped blaster as the crowd surged backwards, spooked by the firearm even if they hadn't noticed the Force power too. Luke kicked the table over, spilling electronic devices over the crouching Duros, who raised his long-fingered hands to protect his shoulders.

_I don't want to hurt them, they're just people–_so Luke took the only escape route available. He found a foothold on the windowsill of the three-story building behind him and pushed himself up, then grabbed hold of an aesthetic outjut of metal and used it just as he had used vines to climb on Dagobah. He pulled himself up, and had scaled halfway up the cliff that the house had become before he sensed a prickle of danger, a blaster trained on his back. He summoned the Force, pushed down on his hands and somersaulted onto a white, baked-tarmac roof studded with flat coolant vents. Thin blue energy fields protected a leafy, green garden on the far corner of the building.

The Sluissi's scaly head poked up over the corner of the roof that Luke had just vacated. Luke backpedaled as it pushed itself up with its muscular tail. Luke spun, and ran to the opposite edge of the roof, expecting a maze of streets in which to loose his pursuers and get back to the _Hawk_.

That was not the sight that greeted him. The floating city itself ended here and all streets ended too, replaced by the oval caps of repulsor pods, and then a shimmering field of energy which was the only thing separating the habitable city from inky space. If he jumped down there, the distance and radiation or other energies would prove fatal even if the impact didn't.

**The stormtroopers were **easy to turn around, the Duros easy to stun with their own blaster, but the Sluissi had disappeared onto the roof. Outjuts made easy handholds--Gwen began to scramble up after the Luke and the last remaining bounty hunter, propelling herself with the Force so that sometimes her fingers barely touched the smooth surface of the residence's walls.

At the moment that she gained the roof she saw the Sluissi corner Luke at the far side of the flat roof, tail waving threateningly beside it. Words she couldn't quite hear flew between them. Then the Sluissi lashed out with a hand. Luke slipped backward and disappeared off the edge of the roof.


	27. Peaceful Confrontations

XXVII

Wedge Antilles entered the tiered meeting room on the Rebel ship as he was tugging his pilot's helmet off, revealing mussed, black hair. As soon as he saw Princess Leia and her small staff of humans and Mon Cals below him, the computer-with-holoproj their podium, he tucked the helmet under his left arm and saluted.

"Thank you for your promptness, Wedge," said Leia, smiling as she watched him walk down the steps before her. It was obvious that he had come directly from his ship, even though the all-important message–that the Imperial activity near the Core did not spell trouble for the Rebellion–had already been delivered via comm as soon as Rogue Squadron had been away from any Imperial ears and out of hyperspace. The loyalty and goodness of the Rebel leaders, including General Antilles, consistently surprised and pleased Leia. Even more than the fanatic or subjugated troops of the Empire or the generally good people in the network of politicians her father had raised her with, the Rebels had a drive to succeed _well_ that warmed her heart.

And it needed warming. She had lain awake last night fretting about Luke and Chewie instead of formulating a plan to rescue Han. The Wookiee was, of course, taking the loss of his best friend hard, and it didn't help that Leia couldn't always understand what he was saying.

She felt that she needed her compatriots' help with planning if the rescue operation was going to work as smoothly as possible, but Lando was always away with his own business for the smugglers or the Rebels. Luke, of course, was working with Master Bolwyn, although Leia half wanted to wrest him away from that responsibility and simply storm Jabba the Hutt's residence with weapons blazing.

Because the only thing that would truly warm her heart again was Han.

She forced herself out of reverie as Wedge approached her. "Greetings, princess."

"Greetings, Wedge." The familiarity with which she addressed him showed more respect than his title would have. "Thank you for your squadron's invaluable information-gathering."

"You're welcome. There's more than just the fact that those ships weren't going after us. It was in-fighting and we found out later that the Imps were attacking a building that belonged to a Black Sun vigo. They've made some noteworthy enemies. This could be good for us."

When Wedge left a short time later to stretch and eat after his long flight, Mical approached Leia, his arms full of flimsi sheets and one datapad. His voice sounded quieter or more sad than usual. "Princess. I've completed an analysis and write-up of the development of the Empire, as much as I could. Most information about the Clone Wars is nonexistent, but...I focused on military procedure and strategy. This should help you predict the Imperial's movements in the future."

Leia accepted the pile, realizing that it was basically a history book, the first since the war had begun. It would be invaluable to historians like Mical as well as to the Rebellion, she thought. "Thank you. You've done your work here, and well–I no longer hesitate to trust you."

"Thank you, princess." He bowed, deeper than was usual. "Speaking of my work here, I have a most humble request. I have completed the task you asked me for, and learned much about this present time. With your permission, I would like to return to the _Ebon Hawk _and my former duties. They report that they are headed for Ba-ion, the last planet on the list. I ought to join them before they return to our time." He looked at her sheepishly.

She smiled at his nervousness. "Certainly. Of course you want to go home to your own people. I'll see about getting you a small ship as soon as possible. When you reach them, you can give the ship to Luke, and he can return here."

Mical smiled. "Yes ma'am."

As they walked toward the hanger and the deck officer, who would see if there was an appropriate ship available, Leia realized that she would miss Mical's quiet presence.

That didn't mean she wouldn't have a tracking device put on his ship in case he headed for the Imperials. He did, after all, have plenty of useful information in his very capable brain.

**Gwen used a **Force-leap to close the distance between herself and the Sluissi before the serpentine alien turned around, disappointed that its bounty had just cast himself off the roof. She shot the Sluissi three times, with blue stun rings that bowed its long body to the ground in front of her. She took a step over its body toward the edge–

and Luke appeared in front of her. Tawny waves rippled through his tousled hair, warm winds whipped around the energetic propulsion coils far below. His feet just touched a cleft on the side of the building, but it looked like he was standing free, riding the winds. He knew the wall with the same skill that he had used as a pilot, knowing tenuous whiffs of the Force inherent in the laws of physics, more skillful than Gwen had thought, rather fetching, skywalking–

His boots touched the rooftop, and for a moment he looked down, breathing hard, fey light fading in his eyes. He smiled at her. "Thanks, Master Bolwyn."

"Thank you, for not falling off the city! We ought to get off this roof, so we don't attract any more attention..."

They descended the side of the building quickly, the way they had come up, and found Carth, nervous like a bodyguard whose charge had gone missing, waiting at the bottom behind the upended table. The crowd of shoppers and spacers had resumed its flow except for a few exceptional gawkers, all ignoring the disheveled and unattended tables. The Duros bounty-hunter hopefuls were gone, perhaps to be back with more, while the Sluissi would wake up in a few hours with only dizziness to show for his try at fame and fortune. Carth squeezed Gwen's hand to reassure both of them.

The three walked off, maneuvering quietly through the crowd to get back to the _Hawk_.

Bao-Dur met them in the first corridor, a thin, sincere smile on his tattooed face. "The crystal you found was the correct one."

"Excellent," said Gwen, and she and Carth followed him into the common room. Anna was there, examining the central computer, along with Mission, who rose from one of the simple chairs set into the wall and smiled jovially when Gwen entered.

The Exile reported, "Three planets, three crystals. One more, and then we can go home." She looked up. "We worried when Bao came back alone."

_I'm sure you did, _Gwen thought sarcastically, noting the informalized name. But then disappointment in herself for thinking so bitterly quashed that train of thought.

Everyone on the _Hawk _was gathered in the common room. Carth and Gwen excused themselves for a moment to hasten to the cockpit and affect a quick takeoff designed to discourage the bounty hunters. The ship peeled away from the city and headed for hyperspace at Carth's command, the crystal from the marketplace interfacing with the galaxy map perfectly. When she was sure everything was running smoothly Gwen prepared to leave, but Carth quietly excused himself from the informal meeting in the common room, saying that he wanted to monitor the ship a bit longer. She nodded and walked through the short connecting hallway, thinking about the one planet they needed to go to, Ba-ion, the one on which they had no information whatsoever because, it seemed, no one else on the HoloNet or in either warring faction did either.

Luke was lounging in a seat, and as Gwen entered she could tell that he was happy that he had escaped and learned a new application of the Force. Spirits were high, but Gwen knew that she would have to make at least one person's life a bit harder today.

"It's good that we've only got one more," Mission translated for Zaalbar.

"But we have no idea what we'll find on this one," Anna said, lifting herself up to sit rakishly on the large computer, long legs draped over its curved side.

"But the Empire doesn't either," Luke replied. "If that bounty hunter reported what we found on Dantooine, to them and they've been following us, this might throw them off."

"I don't think they've been following us," Mission said, "or at least not very well. We haven't seen them."

"No," said Gwen, "that might just mean that they're following us very well indeed."

"Waiting until we get all the crystals for them," Luke followed her train of thought. "Can you imagine what they could do? Rewrite history; make their power...almost everlasting!"

"Advice:", HK-47 said in his cajoling voice. "Perhaps I should accompany those participating in the next venture. I would be instrumental in blasting bounty hunters, followers of the Empire, or sundry meatbags. I do so wish to escape the cramped confines of this ship."

Gwen had learned by now that no matter how amusingly predictable HK–47 could be, it was not a good idea to laugh at the assassin droid. "I don't doubt your usefulness," she replied truthfully, "But we do not need to act on such choices just yet. At ease, everyone, and be ready for whatever awaits us. Master Sacul, I'd like to see you in the dormitory for a moment, please."

The younger woman left the common room immediately, her loose, brown cloak threatening to blend in to the ship interior's shades of gray.

Gwen followed, and stood like a Master on the Council before her seated companion. _I'm like a Council member_, Gwen thought, _but also like the mother of a reckless child. _She cleared her throat softly and began a short, cursorily prepared speech. "Anna, I need you to act like a Jedi Master. You have been distracted from your training, and encouraging the same in your apprentices because of their attachments to you, and vice versa. We're heading into a battle that might be worse than we can imagine. The Empire is strong, just like the Sith were. We need to be strong too, and for Jedi, that means our emotions must not get in the way of our prowess, as they are shown to do."

Anna did not say anything for a moment. Gwen sensed the disrespect boiling up in her heart and halting before her tongue.

"You also are in love," Anna said.

"Carth and I are responsible adults. And we are...content with one another. We restrict our emotions to each other."

"Well what if there was another?" Her voice went sharp. "What if–I do not know the names of your crew. Except–Mandalore. What if you had been attracted to him too, and they allowed you to choose between them and you couldn't."

"If it was war time, I would have to shrug it all off and remain in command of myself instead of extending to others."

"It was wartime when you and Admiral Onasi found the Star Maps."

"And we only became what we are now afterward. Nearer to now than to then, in fact, I'm surprised you didn't know that.

But I am not the issue." Gwen tried to keep her voice soft and kind. "No matter what happened to me, it is you whose indecision and the sadness stemming from it I feel. I know this isn't half as easy to do as it is to say. But you must, at least, choose between your apprentices. The one you prefer will be given to another master, and you can keep the relationship. I'm going to allow those, or else, I know, I'd be a terrible hypocrite. And we might run out of Jedi." She smiled for a moment. "You're going to hurt one of them, and then he's going to recover and be a fine Jedi."

Anna stared at what could be seen of her intertwined hands under the wide sleeves of the Jedi cloak. "I'm going to hurt me."

All Gwen could think of to say was, "Yes you are." Both she and Anna, she was certain, knew well enough that life was full of hurt. The only other thing she could think of to say was 'and you will grow up', but she did not think that would help the situation.

"I'm going to call Mical, tell him to meet us at Ba-ion. If that's really the last planet, it might be when we get to go home, and he needs to be there. Afterward I'll choose."

Gwen thought that was a good decision. Maybe the only thing keeping Anna attached to Bao-Dur was the unavailability of Mical, who, although he was a bit younger than Anna, Gwen preferred as Anna's match. He kept her calmer.

_What if I had been alone with Canderous, even for as long as I was alone with Carth after the escape pod crashed on Taris?_ Those memories were fond now, like old mistakes become funny; thoughts of Taris evoked not only reminiscence for the razed planet itself but for Bastila before Gwen knew her, when she imagined a guru and found a firebrand, for Bastila before the dark side claimed her even briefly, for innocence. But then she had found that, even if unconventional, Bastila could be a sort of mentor and friend, and that memories from behind Darth Revan's mask were reminders of how tenuous the dark side had seemed next to Jedi serenity. But beside that, what if...Canderous?

Gwen smiled and shook her head at memories of the old crew, but couldn't see herself, even her younger self, with the Mandalorian. He was too inured to violence, which she found attractive in that it proved a man capable only if it was minimal and for a cause, like the Jedi taught and Carth supported._Causes,_ Gwen thought, _also make up the difference between Anna and me. She fought the hidden Sith Lords while I was away–from what she told me of her quests, though, they were not as hidden as anyone thought. We were working for different things; I for an Order solidly in place, obviously light, versus the dark that wanted the power of the Star Forge. Pretty much good versus evil. She fought to reinstate an Order she didn't have any reason to like. It was more personal, lonelier, less structured._

"Thank you for taking my advice to heart," Gwen said politely, reminding Anna that they were, in terms of rank, on equal footing. She did not want to sound like...well, like Bastila sometimes did.

"You're welcome." Anna said quietly, and moved toward her own bed as if she were going to nap.

_She is pretty, _Gwen had to admit after a glance at Anna before the older woman left. Even though the former Exile's hair was cropped short, it was clean and matched the shape of her face well. Hers was a soft-lined face, less hawklike than Gwen's, and a quirky joy shone in her eyes sometimes, a childlike desire for knowledge. It pained Gwen to see that quirk of expression, rare now, covered by the clouds of sadness and pensive thought.

**Luke stood a **few paces behind Carth, looking out at the stars warped by hyperspace. They enthralled him, just like speeders or podracers did, perhaps more so. He could list his loves easily: space; racing; and anything to do with the Jedi. If only Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru could see him now, living his daydreams.

The Force had struck him in a new way as he fell from the roof in the city over Duro. He wondered if he could use it against Darth Vader or in the battle, more important than and separable from the physical one, for his father's soul. It hadn't been a technique really, a new application of power, but rather a new _feeling_. It was clarity, a lack of fear, which had allowed him to combine a Jedi's abilities to levitate things and to boost physical prowess of sundry kinds, just as he had done with climbing. It was like a slow jump, like flight; the next step up from the jump Luke had used to escape the carbonite freezing pit during his duel with Vader on Bespin.

Its root was _confidence_. He had been sure that, even if he fell, the Force would get him out of danger. He had trusted it, and it had given him reason to trust himself.

He did know what Beru and Owen would say. Their voices, the ones he had known most often for nineteen years, stuck in his mind.

She would worry, saying that Luke had found one more way to express himself but still advising him against its dangerous practice; Owen would insist that it didn't matter what Luke could do with the Force if it wasn't important to harvesting or cleaning or keeping Imperials and Sand People away.

He missed them, in ways.

And what would his real father, Darth Vader, say? Because there was a weight that came with the confidence too. It had crept in on him when he easily dispatched the Duros, in the knowledge that they were commoners and he was a Knight, so they had no chance, whether or not Gwen and Carth stepped in. It was an enviable arrogance.

Where, after this, was the line keeping him from the dark side drawn? He did not know. But he could ask Master Gwen about it, and could develop if not the skywalking technique specifically, the confidence that allowed it.

He realized with a small shock that he had been accepting, if not necessarily being comfortable with, plainly considering Vader his father. For so long he had denied it, and then forced it into a volatile ball of emotions which flared like a neutron star every time he touched it with the heavy matter of his worries. But that explosive surface had settled and cooled, into a brown dwarf of intent and calm. The path ahead of him was clearer now, not fogged by emotion, even though he still had no definite plan. He would turn Vader to the light side, just as Vader was attempting to bring him to the dark.

For a moment daydreams took him, images of Vader surprising the galaxy by appearing on the HoloNet to apologize for his crimes. He would live in the same home with Luke, and they would get to know one another not as leaders on opposite sides of the war but as father and son, as men who saw one another every day, as histories and small traits...

But no; mentally Luke shook that image off. It was too good to dwell on. It would release too much pain the longer it was not reality, if Luke let it sink into his consciousness, just as his un-Jedi-like dreams of escaping Tatooine had been.

But that didn't mean that either of those dreams was impossible to achieve.

_**Just a few **__minutes ago, _Anna thought_, I was eager to be able to go home. But...do I really want to? It's what I've been working toward, but what I'm going back to is the Jedi Order, to my utterly failed role as a Master to two apprentices as adult as I am. Back to people the likes of Revan, who have the seniority to look down on me, and use it? Back to Atton! _(--which evoked images of even more tangled emotions, but also memories of Atton as her longtime and first companion, always ready with a humorously irreverent comment–) _What if I just stayed here, in this time? What if Bao and I just...stayed?_


	28. M'rytlil

XXVIII

Darth Vader was eager for the upcoming battle. Adrenaline he had not felt in his padded body and ponderous, scalded thoughts for a long time filled him at the prospect of seizing this time-traveling ability, challenging Darth Revan, and seeing Luke again. The former would be a true test of his Sith abilities: the latter would be another prime chance to bring Luke to the dark side, now that the boy knew and was surely emotionally unsettled by his parentage.

The battle was, of course, not just personal; he had also organized a small fleet of starships, thousands of stormtroopers, and all-terrain ground vehicles. He did not think that it was overkill to move with such numbers against a handful of Jedi, not if two were Masters and one was a Skywalker.

But for that very reason, there was also a very personal side to the battle, and Vader had prepared for all of the one-on-one battles to be as skewed in the Empire's direction as possible. Individual units, like himself, would move in along with the stormtroopers.

He surveyed the lineup of three different aliens who stood on the bridge with him, hyperspace visible through the tapering viewports behind them. (Boba Fett had been invited to be one of this elite number, but had declined, and Vader had allowed that. No need for someone else who knew the true purpose of this 'move against covert Rebels and Jedi sympathisers'–that purpose being to gain the crystals–to possibly try to betray Vader for them in the midst of the operation.) Each alien commando had been chosen for its natural resistance to or skill against Jedi powers, and had been outfitted by the Empire in heavy, green-camouflaged gear suited to the plains of M'rytlil. Vader did not see them as subhuman like Emperor Palpatine did; whatever the source of the Sith Lord's aversion to aliens, despite the fact that he had spent as much time with them in the senate as Anakin Skywalker had with them in the Jedi temple, learning that they were as varied and intelligent as humans, it had not been passed on to his apprentice.

The Toydarian, his false paunch and short stature belying the fact that he was an expert cage fighter, was, due to the unique structure of his cognitive organ, completely immune to Jedi mindtricks and some Force attacks just like everyone of his species was.

The Anzati, away from whom the Imperials had all averted their eyes despite the fact that most of them had not seen a female in months, could sense a Jedi with her unique, hidden tendrils and would fly into a rage of lethal desire for the Jedi's brain matter. She would be a useful weapon to point at whatever target whose survival Vader cared about least–she had been threatened with painful death if she strayed too near Luke.

The Bothan had once been a Rebel agent. Now, metal antennae sprouted from the back of his head as if they had been driven through his skin beneath his cream-colored mane, which basically they had. None too gently, he had been transformed into an experiment and a weapon after his capture during a spying mission. Those antennae basically pumped midi-chlorian-laced cells into his brain, gifting him with the occasional Force power and a Force presence which confused anyone who paid attention to it. This Bothan could sneak up on a Jedi and it wouldn't be able to tell whether he was Force-user, sentient, vegetable, or animal–he would seem to be one after the other in succession. His life span had been shortened to something like three years, and the technology enabling him had been developed at the very tail end of Order 66, using the bodies of dead Jedi to create this Bothan-weapon that could find and at least distract the more stubborn of their comrades. Now, his life span was measured in weeks, but only his brain showed it. Bodily, he was in his prime, and very fit for one last mission.

Armed with the might of an Imperial fleet, and with these freaks of nature and science, Vader thought that he had a very high likelihood of crushing Revan's allies' chances of attaining their goal.

**"Someone needs to **stay here with the ship," Gwen instructed as she stood confidently near the closed ramp. "We have no idea how the portal back to our time is going to manifest. If it's anything like it was before, anything within a few meters' radius would be taken, but we can't fly into that valley without boxing the ship in, making it very vulnerable to quick ground attack or orbital bombardment. It needs to stay here, and I suggest Admiral Onasi, Mission, and Zaalbar stay with it."She continued before the Twi'lek could protest what surely appeared to be coddling her. "Mission, you need to be the gunner. Take the turret or the copilot's place, whichever Carth suggests. Zaalbar needs to watch the comm. Whoever discovers the portal first needs to call to the ship and tell it to get as close as it can. It will be our rallying point and, unless its' absolutely impossible, go back to our time with us." She met Carth's eyes seriously. "However, the crew is more important than the Hawk. If you need to, repel out and leave it hovering."

They had arrived on Ba-ion about half an hour ago, and still knew little about the planet. Green-yellow from orbit, with one sea making up about a third of the surface area, it had initially reminded Gwen of a town without any inhabitants, the sort a single protagonist might find himself in during a surreal holovid. Emissions and other readings indicated that the inhabitants of Ba-ion were primitive compared to the galactic norm, not producing much of the greenhouse gases and light pollution that a civilization, however environmentally friendly, gave off as it went about its daily business. As they had ducked under the atmosphere and beheld an unending vista of yellow-green, grass-colored plains, a group of beings, apparently nomadic, had scattered as the ship passed overhead on its way to a landing, paddle-shaped tendrils unfolding like natural umbrellas or tents from around their blue-skinned heads. The navicomp had indicated that the _Hawk_ should land in an area of the plains marked by a circular ring of hills. Closer to it, a break in the hills had come into view. Although the circle didn't look like anything built by the Rakatans that Gwen had seen before, it didn't look natural either.

"Your second purpose," Gwen continued, focusing on Carth and Zaalbar, "is to report to us if and in what strength Imperials enter the equation." Luke had lectured Carth and Gwen extensively on what war machines and tactics Imperials liked. Again, the older warriors had expressed surprise about how much the galaxy had _not _advanced since their time. It had instead, it seemed, grown tired and used. Rather ineffective war machines could, though, take out one ship's worth of warriors as easily as more advanced ones. "Everyone else will accompany me."

'Everyone else' was HK-47 and the other three Jedi; Anna, Bao-Dur, and Luke. They stood by the ramp, armed and armored. Bao-Dur thumbed open the hatch, and yellow sunlight from outside glinted off his azure armor. Anna wore the skirted, blue armor which she preferred, while Luke had his white-gray gear and Gwen stuck with simple tan robes which would restrict neither movement nor Force powers. Fresh air rushed into the ship from outside and circulated in the entrance corridor, rippling her loose sleeves and bringing the refreshing scent of grass as well as an odd tang that Gwen realized must be air without pollutants. As everyone else began to walk out into the sunlit plain, Gwen hesitated.

Carth caught her by the hand and drew her into a kiss. She broke it smiling, flooded by images, more wishful than precognitive, of their future together.

He quietly said, "Survive."

**Anna walked the **half-klick to the circle of hills at the front of the group. It was indeed an odd-looking landscape; the hills in a perfect circle, seen from the ground as arms stretching to the left and right, their low peaks undaunted by erosion. She realized as she moved closer that they rose only a bit higher than the _Hawk _itself; they were a wall, but not an impenetrable one, and not a true mountain range at all. A break in the hills offered entrance, a roofless tunnel through which only more grassland could be seen.

HK-47 was walking closest to her, his metal joints clicking softly. He stalked along with a stagger that looked entirely unnatural compared to Bao-Dur and the others behind him, who were furtive in their movements and Force presences, awaiting attack from an unknown source. Admittedly, the only place such an attack could come from where it would hit before they could make the shelter of either the ship or the mountains was from above, but with the Imperials coming at an unknown hour that possibility, and the odd quietude of this nearly fallow planet, nevertheless kept them nervous.

As they walked through the low, grassy area which allowed access into the circle, though, that nervousness died. Instead, Anna was struck with a feeling of peace and healing. Just as Korriban and Malachor reeked of the dark side, this enclosed area oozed light side influence with similar power and enthusiasm. She shivered as Bao-Dur's happiness flooded the Force; he loved this feeling of peace, of wilderness like Telos but unspoiled…

"I've never felt anything like this," Gwen said softly.

Luke moved forward, farther out into the full sunlight and the hills' embrace. He looked hypnotized. "It's like…

But he did not get to finish his sentence. Gwen's commlink crackled, and she snatched it up. Anna, farthest from her, could hear Carth's voice clearly.

"We've got ships approaching, some capital-class. Probably Imperials."

"ETA?" Gwen said, voice flat.

"About twenty minutes."

"Delightful." Gwen fixed her gaze on the opposite side of the range of hills. Anna had not noticed it before, but there was a cave entrance there, close enough to run to but far enough that—

"The _Hawk _could land in here," Gwen said to the comm. "As soon as I tell you, fly in. Otherwise, we can't stop the Imperials now. We have to complete our task." The comm clicked off and Gwen fixed her gaze on Anna. "Remember, it is essential that _you_ get to the cave and stay there, ready to get us out of here—but only when everyone is in range, within meters or so of you, and Luke is ought of it." The crystals were a weight in Anna's pocket. She could be the only one to activate the time travel, however it would manifest, because she was the nexus in the Force mentioned in the Rakatan hologram. She nodded.

Ba-ion's peace did not shatter or disappear as the party ran toward the cave, Imperial landers beginning to drag the clouds overhead into contrails. It remained, infiltrating Anna's thoughts with the illusion of comfort, negating her ability to picture herself diving into battle as she would soon have to.


	29. Eyes in a Crowd

XXIX

**4000 BBY**

"Be careful, flyboy," Mira counseled. She stood on the ramp of her starship as it hovered over the whipping grasses of M'rytlil, within the circle of hills where the Force flowed so smoothly.

Below her Atton Rand stood on the ground next to Jedi Master Fnaa, the alien whose homeworld this was and whose brother had suggested that the ruins here might be connected to the Rakatan crystals crucial to Anna's recovery. For a moment Atton watched the way the sun crimsoned Mira's red hair, and then he raised a hand in a relaxed-looking salute. "Don't worry. The Force is so peaceful here...I doubt I'll step on a myrmin."

"The car_ees_a is in fact the smallest native insect," Fnaa said casually as he walked away from the departing ship, his Reera accent turning the double 'e' sound into a squeaky scream. Atton followed him. "We have no myrmins h_ee_re."

"Whatever." Atton switched his gaze forwards, to where he could see the dark mouth of a cave marking the side of the ring of mountains opposite from the entrance. That was where master Fnaa was headed. That was where the two men needed to go to investigate the mysterious power–what the Reeras called 'the magic' and what Atton suspected was the Force–that might have something to do with Anna's appearance to him.

Her imminent return after their rough parting, as well as his uncertainty about what he was going to find in the cave, would have bothered him, probably prompting him to set a hand on his blaster or lightsaber, but the Force here seemed to whisper of calm. It was unsettling that he should feel so peaceful, as if he were lying calmly by a river instead of accompanying a Jedi he half-trusted onto a planet he knew little-to-nothing about. He wanted to shake off the Force, like a dog would shake off water, but this river forced itself inside him and he exulted in the drowning. He had never felt the Force with such clarity, and the only thing he knew to compare its strength to was the height of the dark side–or the beacon that Anna had been compared to the darkness of Kreia and Malachor. Because this was pure lightside, and it came as easily to his fingertips as the dark ever had–but he did not want to use it to strike. He wanted–because it wanted him to–to heal and save, like Anna had taught, even if that power was more challenging to master, and less euphoric.

But the dark was not more euphoric than the light. Certainly not here, anyway.

The Force only barely allowed him to think about his long days divorced from it entirely. It felt like a natural part of him now, not like a tool for torture.

If the light side could feel like this, he thought, maybe he should accept the offers of the many people who wanted to see him join the Jedi Order.

They had almost reached the shadowy entrance to the cave, which, Atton saw, was in fact a tunnel, too round to be natural. "Do you s_ee_?" The Reera Master said, spreading his blue hands and leaning back comfortably, settling his weight on the limb that was sometimes like a tail and sometimes like a third leg. "This vale is _special _to the Force. It shows that, even when useless, the Force is majestic and potent. Remember this, and your meditations will be d_ee_per..."

"Useless?" Atton questioned, peering into the shadows of the tunnel. Had he seen movement? He did not sense any danger...

"Yes," Master Fnaa said slowly, nodding. "There is nothing to challenge us here, and yet without the war which we Jedi have become so used to, the Force is at its most powerful..."

"I don't think there's nothing to fight here," Atton said warily.

Figures lurched out of the darkness. They wore armor and tattered cloaks like something out of a history vid, and scarlet helmets, their crests molded into the shapes of stylized horns. Their gauntleted arms and gloved hands swung glimmering vibroblades, the weapons buzzing as if the internal mechanisms had atrophied from disuse. Silently but for the clicking of the armor, the newcomers–entirely devoid of Force sense, _unless_, Atton thought, _all this lightside-ness really is malicious and has been blocking them from our view this whole time_ –approached the two, weapons raised. As the sunlight swept over the armored forms, they broke into a run.

At that moment, Master Fnaa proved that, even with all that talk of peace, he deserved the title of Jedi. He launched himself into the air, head-tails spinning, and somehow didn't cut himself with the two lightsabers that came to life in his hands and, gyroscoping with his body, slashed into the nearest armored figure. It fell in two, and the others hesitated in their lurching progression toward Atton.

Atton drew his favored blaster, a carbine as long as his forearm, and was about to say something snarky about Jedi not being supposed to slash first and ask questions later before beginning his own attack, but then he caught sight of what was inside the armor that Fnaa had bisected.

Nothing. There was no once-living body inside the armor. Atton could see the rust-colored, curving interior of the chest plate.

He flung up a hand, wearing a perplexed expression but focused enough to Force-push the helmet up and away from the foe closest to him. It came off easily, and flew back into the tunnel to clatter on the rocky ground.

The rest of the suit of armor, headless and empty, continued walking toward him.

**4 ABY**

Bao-Dur broke into a run after Gwen and Anna did. He focused on the dark tunnel ahead, and on the backs of the two women who angled like starfighters toward it. He felt that it would be effortless to heal here, but any other aspect of the Force felt alien to him–just as he would be afraid of surrendering himself too much to the Force in an area strong with the dark side, he was wary of it here as well. It did not match his own emotions and life experiences enough to be easily harnessed.

The group reached the shadow of a cave that plunged straight back into the hillside–more of a tunnel, really–just as finned starships broke the clouds and released a flurry of repelling stormtroopers. Bao-Dur had learned that one or two of the white-armored minions usually did not pose a problem to a Jedi, but now there were hundreds, descending like a plague, lines dropping them from the ships to the peaks of the ring of mountains. The troopers started to clamber or drop down to the ground, running toward the tunnel entrance with blasters ready in their hands. It looked like war in miniature, more than any of the other battles he had fought in this present time so far–

a flash of red alerted him to one person in a controlled fall down a line to the grass who was not identical to the other stormtroopers. A flapping, red cloak was clinched around the waist of an unarmed woman who was descending in the midst of the Imperials. Bao-Dur could not tell from where he stood what species she was, but despite her physical structure he hesitated to call her humanoid; her mind was alien in the extreme, offering him a landscape of new kinds of thoughts and emotions. Overwhelmingly, though, was the very recognizable sensation of _hunger–_

Was she, after all this time, a follower of Nihilus?

His attention was dragged away from the incoming Imperials when spikes of danger in the Force returned it to Anna and Gwen.

_Things _were sluggishly walking out of the tunnel mouth, humanoid forms armored in red plates that looked like they were old enough to have been made from bone instead of plasteel. But Bao-Dur could sense nothing living within them at all, just more of the powerful Force miasma that permeated this place. His concerns were proved founded when Gwen launched a preemptive strike, her green lightsaber darting forward while the purple _shoto _blade sprouted to guard her shoulder and face from the vibroblade the armored form wielded. The afterimages of a neon slash showed one fluted helmet shorn in two.

There was no head inside, and the suit of armor continued to lurch forward until Gwen sunk her lightsaber to the hilt in its chest plate.

Before Bao-Dur could do any more than accept the phenomenon before him, more mundane but no less deadly foes, the stormtroopers, were upon the group as well. An overwhelming pincer movement of white-shelled forms forced him to turn and begin deflecting blaster bolts, Luke doing the same thing a few meters away, as the others carved into the red armor and blasterbolts dove toward them in swarms. Bao-Dur's orange lightsaber spun and turned away swaths of green, shrieking lasers. His eyes darted around, searching for that alien woman. She was a different sort of danger than these numbers, more important to look out for–as HK-47 gleefully unleashed a flamethrower on a cadre of stormtroopers at Bao-Dur's left–

There she was, climbing like a spider on the rocks above the tunnel, splashing through a stream. Her red cloak draped her feminine form, and could as easily have been concealing a weapon. For now, though, she was unarmed, but there was something wrong with her face. The smooth, tan skin of her cheeks right next to her nose bulged, as if she breathed through there, but no–she _ate _through there. The fanatic hunger increased as the Imperial woman climbed like a spider toward the top of the tunnel, directly above Anna, who was in a battle with a suit of armor _and _a stormtrooper.

Bao-Dur batted away another flurry of lasers, stepped backwards, extended a hand, and threw the Imperial woman off the roof of the tunnel and onto the ground at his feet.

Thin, moving tendrils peeked out of the pouches at her cheeks. Her eyes burned black as she scrambled to her feet. Out of the corner of his eyes, Bao-Dur saw a suit of armor impale a stormtrooper. Luke and HK-47 were driving the first wave of distant Imperials back with the flamethrower and deflected blasterbolts. So the space around them was clear of combat as the woman looked at Bao-Dur and started to hypnotize him.

**Gwen ducked a **slash from a rusty vibroblade, cut the knees out from under the rest of the red armor, and stabbed the thing through the throat as she rose. She and Anna were completely under the roof of the tunnel now, the sandy ground littered with pieces of armor and with stormtrooper's bodies, as many marked by vibroblades as by lightsabers. It was obvious to the former Dark Lord that these suits of armor possessed by only the Force were guardians for whatever lay ahead. It surprised her, though, that such a vale inhabited by the light side would have violence as its guard–

more figures were coming from further down the tunnel, eclipsing the small circle of light Gwen could see at its end. A second group of six, identical to the first.

"This isn't right," Gwen thought out loud. Anna brushed against her as the former Exile stepped forward, ready to swing her staff lightsaber at the first foe that approached them .Gwen got a questioning look from the younger woman's bright eyes.

"Violence can't be the answer this place wants." Gwen sucked in an enervating breath. "Turn off your lightsaber."

"What?" Anna exclaimed.

The green and violet blades died. A moment later, the blue ones did too. When Anna set a hand on the blaster at her hip, Gwen waved at her to relax.

The suits of armor approached as quickly and steadily as they had before, vibroblades held ready in gloved and gauntleted hands, but when they reached the two tense, peace-offering Jedi, they split like water flowing around a rock and continued toward the entrance of the cave.

**Bao-Dur did not **want to stop looking at the alien woman's eyes. They were contact-scarlet, not Sith-crimson; beautiful like the soft petals of a flower. He could smell her now, a musk as unlike Anna's scent as an electrical fire was from one fueled by a forest. Her hunger, her need to be closer to him, became his own–

A jet of real flame flew between them, and suddenly HK-47 was standing next to Bao-Dur, stepping prissily over the bodies of charred stormtroopers. "Surprised statement:", said the droid, sounding very bemused and looking at the woman, "I have never before been privileged to see an Anzat up close. Avoid her stare, Iridonian, and as much of her as you can, or else she'll eat your brain."

On that pleasant note, HK-47 turned away to spray fire across a group of stormtroopers who had been sneaking around behind him, headed for the tunnel.

Bao-Dur moved backwards into a solid fighting stance, lightsaber between him and the woman whose thoughts seemed to be withdrawing tendrils from his own, watching her elbows and legs instead of her face so that he would know if she were about to attack. Indeed she drew two hand-length knives from her belt and advanced, holding them high so that to watch the blades he would have to risk her stare. He cut at her legs, and the knives skittered and crackled along the orange blade. Cortosis-laced, unlike all but a very few bladed weapons of this era–this woman, Bao-Dur surmised, must specialize in fighting Force-users. That did not prevent him from using the Force to predict her movements as he allowed her to drive him back, away from the route the majority of stormtroopers were taking toward the tunnel. Luke and HK-47 had corralled a group of them, and every once in a while out of the corner of his eye he saw a white-armored form or two go flying over the low mountains. The Anzat knew what she was doing, though, and he needed to focus so as not to get pulled into her hypnotism every time his gaze grazed her face.

Once a strike meant to cleave her shoulder missed, and as he recovered she darted in and slashed at his face. He stepped back and hit her with a kick that she folded over. As he stepped back again she coughed and straightened up, the madness in her eyes as well as her recovery convincing him further that these Anzati possessed strength beyond most Zabraks.

He stretched out the Force and threw her into a spin that held, a whirlwind that trapped her. Each time he stabbed into it toward her, though, those knives were somehow there, blocking, turning his strikes aside, and when his energy failed and he had to release the Force she rolled to her feet and slashed at his ankles. One blade drew blood; the other he stamped down on.

Crushing hands, attacking legs–these were not techniques the Jedi had taught him. The Mandalorian Wars had. Although he had been an engineer, not a soldier per se, he had gone through requisite basic training and had needed to retreat under fire, going hand-to-hand with Mandalorians and, once, a spy he had trusted, at least twice. He could fight, even though the lightsaber in his hands was not yet as natural as a zhaboka or vibroblade.

He just couldn't fight like a Jedi, with the calm and honor that Anna had taught and that, on Iridonia, Anna had lost. Not in a raw, ruleless battle like this. It was not, memory told him, the effective way to go up against foes in large numbers or ones significantly stronger than oneself.

Which the Anzati was. Except he stamped on her hand, drove it into the ground. She screamed, and he swung his lightsaber behind him to gain momentum needed to slice forward and take off her head.

The Force warned him of danger a second before a laserbolt, thicker than that shot from a blaster, dug a furrow into the ground right where he was standing. He leapt backwards. The Anzat leapt the opposite way, and Bao-Dur looked up to see a two-legged, square-headed machine stalking toward him on thudding durasteel legs. Luke had never told him that the Empire had anything like this, but inside the dark eye-holes of the mechanical beast Bao-Dur could see a stormtrooper and a oval-helmeted, human pilot. Smoke had oozed into the vale, and now he could see why; more walking machines were climbing the mountains and wading into the one-on-one fights, seeking out the Empire's very few foes.

This particular walker had its sights set on Bao-Dur.

"Sorry General," he sighed, fear paling his skin beneath tattoos, "I'm not a fighter. I'm an engineer."


	30. The Scholar and the Rogue

XXX

XXX

**4 ABY**

Anna and Gwen walked slowly, warily, into the cave. They passed six more suits of armor, sitting against the rock wall as if they were sleeping, before they came again into the sun.

The place they found themselves in next was room-sized, not valley-sized, though it too was surrounded by unnaturally jagged rock cliffs. Grass began again as soon as the sunlight did, and ended at a wall which had obviously been made by sentient hands. A square of rock had been mounted like a plaque on the sheer wall, and into it had been carved the figure-eight symbol that was accepted to mean _infinity_.

Below the symbol, in a claw-fingered setting, was the final crystal.

Anna reached out.

"Wait," said Gwen. "Remember. We can't activate it until everyone who needs to go back is ready. As soon as I can"–comm signal did not reach into this alcove– "I'll call the _Hawk_."

"Right," Anna nodded. "And before that..."

"We help Luke. We take out as many Imperials as possible."

**4000 BBY**

"That's different," Attonexclaimed, feeling disgust curl his lips. Master Fnaa ducked as a vibroblade slung by a suit of armor whistled through the air over his head.

"It makes perfect sense!" said the Reera. "This is a place of peace."

"So it throws enemies at us to make us peaceful? Brilliant!" He put two holes through the helmet of a suit that was lurching toward him, and the thing collapsed, unsettlingly jointless. Two others crowded one another behind it for the privilege of attacking him next.

"No!" said Master Fnaa. "This is a test. Power down your weapon!"

"Are you serious?" Atton sidestepped the suit of armor that won the shoving contest with its brother, blaster raised and ready.

The Reera extinguished his lightsabers and sat back on his tail-leg just as a suit of armor cut for his left shoulder.

His tentacles along that side twitched, and Atton felt a strange surge of pride at how the Jedi was not perfect–but the suit of armor stopped. Inches from Fnaa's head-tails, the vibroblade dipped to the suit of armor's side.

Atton tentatively pointed his blaster's muzzle toward the ceiling.

The armored forms in front of him stopped, maybe tilted their heads to the side, and did not move again.

"Woo," sighed Atton. "That was weird."

Master Fnaa walked forward into the tunnel as if nothing yet had upset the rhythm of his steps. Into the cool dark they progressed, their footsteps silent in the dirt. They passed armor slumped lifeless against the walls, and Atton could not resist flicking his fingers against one dulled, red helmet. It did not react.

A few steps later, the sky opened up ahead of them again. There was the plaque, the symbol of infinity, the silver crystal. Master Fnaa remained respectfully silent.

"Okay," said Atton, moving forward slowly, "I don't exactly see any control surfaces here..."

Master Fnaa only had time to whisper, "Use the Force," and then the Force began to use Atton. He saw Anna standing, slightly transparent like a hologram but fully colored, in the exact same place Atton stood now, black-haired Revan right behind her. Atton dragged in one surprised breath.

Then, for a moment, he forgot about himself. He forgot that Fnaa should be standing next to him, that his feet should be on the ground, that he should be a body and not a spirit.

When he remembered to care about his surroundings, he saw that they were exactly the same as they had been a moment ago, except that Fnaa was no where to be seen, and that jet-trails had drug the white clouds across the sky.

**4 ABY**

Mical came out of hyperspace into a staging area. Wedge-shaped Imperial ships filled the space around Ba-ion. His astromech droid screeched as he wrenched the ship into a slide away from the river of blasterbolts that suddenly poured toward him from a capital ship. He accelerated further into the crowd of ships and toward the planet. The Imps would take a moment to realize that an outsider was in their midst. They'd take a moment, as Mical would, for their balance and sensors to recover from his emerging hyperspace far closer to other craft than he should have. He pushed the small, square ship the Rebels had given him to the limits of his speed. He had to get down to that planet, if this fleet was what Anna and the others faced.

He was not a particularly good pilot. He was good at research, organization, and while the spatial reasoning such things required also helped in the visualization necessary for space combat, he had downright neglected flight training during his Jedi years.

The astromech wasn't very good at combat either. It lit up the weapons controls and shield monitors in bright fans on his display screen, but could not fire without a command; mostly it beeped and screamed. It was no R2-D2.

But these odds, and the Imperials, did not know what they faced. They did not feel the fire that raised behind Mical's eyes just as shivers raised the hair on the back of his neck.

Because he did not have innate or practiced skill, but he had drive. He could visualize himself slicing through the fleet like a spear of light, because he needed to get down to that planet.

And because it would make an excellent story.

He had always liked the ancient tales of heroes. The shallower the stone a story had been carved into was from rain or wind, the better. The more filled with the trappings of the past—bulky armor decorated with precious stones, horned and scaled beasts, lightsabers whose wielders needed to learn to avoid the cables running between the hilt and the power pack—the better. He had always wanted to be a hero, and when Anna the Knight had come into his life, blazed through, became Anna the Exile, swept him up in her quest, he had felt closer to that possibility than ever before. He still never thought of himself as a hero. But holding her, knowing her, was almost close enough.

And now, with all the power of an almost-hero, he was going to blast past these ships and rescue whoever down there needed rescuing.

"Automate the, ah," With quick flicks of his head he scanned the control lights. "all the guns except the forward laser." That meant two laser cannons. "No preprogrammed evasive maneuvers. Ah, as much power to the shields as is feasible."

The Empire noticed him, as evidenced by the eight square-winged TIE fighters pouring from the nearest capital ship's undercarriage. For a moment, Mical realized how unimportant he must seem if they were only sending out eight. Not that he wanted a Star Destroyer to start turning in his direction.

A comm call was coming in from one of the TIEs, and Mical immediately hit the key to ignore it. He shoved joysticks forward, accelerating into Ba-ion's mass shadow, still pincered by the fleet. Ships shifted like behemoths, like whaladons, around him, the TIEs the smaller, flesh-eating fish between them.

He continued accelerating and sweeping around capital ships, and soon enough the TIEs caught him.

Lasers arced around him, shrieking. Mical dropped straight down and heard lasers shooting from his own ship, backwards and up—on the holographic tactical screen floating to his left one of the red TIE silhouettes winked out. "Good job, astrodroid—"

One TIE curved toward his twelve o'clock, far out where it was credit-chit-sized, and he shifted one hand off a joystick onto another and squeezed the trigger. Green bolts lanced out and caught the TIE's solar panel, tracking, poking, and the panel fell away and burned. He pressed on, numbers instead of perspective telling him that the Star Destroyers were falling away above and behind him even as the TIEs were catching up. He had avoided their wrath by virtue of being small and unexpected. The only horizon was upside-down, the blue bowl of Ba-ion, and Mical could not help but stumble over a breath at the beauty of it.

As the atmosphere brushed his shields, no wall of heat yet, just wisps, he juked sideways. His descent vector needed to be unexpected, because it was a set angle; the later the TIEs locked on to it, the better—Laserbolts caromed past, drawing neon trails in the transparent clouds against black space. He wrenched the joysticks to the side as the astromech, its words written in blue Basic across a small screen in front of him, told him that it was counting down to descent. That descent had to be perfectly diagonal through the thickest part of the atmosphere, or else the heat of the clouds would overload the shields and leave him vulnerable to the enemy ships. And TIEs were still coming. No more had winked out since the first—it did not seem that the astrodroid was a very good shot.

Mical drew in a breath and harnessed the Force.

As if a new, perfect tracking screen had been programmed and laid across the universe, he _knew _the positions of the TIEs, the focused minds of the pilots, the planet like a weight in front of and below them. He knew without thinking about it where to place his hands to control the one gun and fly steadily at the same time.

He knew to whip the ship around _now_ and spin once, thrice, shooting as he went, targets lining up with lasers like the polar ends of magnets. Five ships and pilots disappeared into sun-colored conflagration, and then with one final skin-straining turn he locked on to the descent vector just as quickly, diving, clouds streaming off the shields.

Two TIEs remained, and he could _feel _them, pulling on physics, pilots determined and jittery and visible like mountains on the plain of the Force—

They needed to be careful in their dive too, and the distance between them and him did not lesson as Mical's ship broke through the atmosphere. He flicked a switch to turn one of his screens into a topographical map as he began to see seas and planes below him, flat rectangles of color. He had no specific directions as to where the _Hawk _was, but judging by those Imperial ships there would be battle in the place he needed to be, and that was visible from the elevation he was at. He could skim at this elevation and velocity and work over the whole planet if he had to, if he didn't run out of fuel—

He didn't have to. The astromech whistled and scrolled words across the screen: "SIGNIFICANT HEAT SOURCES 80 KLICKS AHEAD."

"Make for them," Mical said. "We'll come down in the middle if we must."

From high enough, the battle of the Valley of Eternity looked like a sunburst, lines of machines moving toward the ring of mountains, although the sunburst had no center: there, combatants were too small to be noticed; the all-terrain, animal-shaped machines had trouble getting over the mountains. Mical's ship whipped by at speed and turned, the Force picking up his compatriots now, and spikes and starts of violence—

One of the TIE fighters was in visual range before he thought to check the screens for it. He squeezed off two shots that the TIE rolled onto one wing to avoid, glanced at the tactical screen, and gasped and jerked the joysticks sideways as _the second TIE was coming in from above—_It hit him square on. He saw a sheet of plating as big as the forward viewscreen slough off the top of his ship and hurtle across his field of vision. The astromech screamed, and klaxons blazed, filling the cockpit with strobing red light. A moment later he realized why, as a hissing sound heralded a spray of fire retardant from the droid, heading for the immolated ceiling. There was one layer of plating between him and the sky, and at this velocity—

He put the ship into a dive, unknowing whether that was the right thing to do or not, determined to get back on foot where he felt comfortable, and where he could be of help. The walls around him shook, and the one reading he cared about was elevation.

With sickening speed the mountains around the valley, and the people within, turned from a smear of brown and dots of white to three-dimensional things. Stormtroopers scattered as he descended in the middle of the circle of mountains. The Force was reaching for him, insisting, but he pushed it away as if it were grabbing hands. He didn't have time—

The crash was a rumble and a crunch, Crash webbing and inertial dampeners kept him locked to his seat and the astromech to its socket. Dirt plumed, and rained down on the viewscreen—seconds after the landing he unclipped and threw the crash webbing away from himself, and stumbled through the ship to the door in the back between the engine tubes. The droid squealed and rolled to his side. The roof fire had been tamed, but it was still eating away at the vulnerable wires inside the plating, and who knew what reactionary substances it might find.

Mical realized before he bothered to press the door controls that something prevented them from working. Whether it had been the ground or a TIEs' blast—likely the former, as no atmosphere breach had added to the sirens--the door was warped, tilted downward and pulled out of shape. When he did hit the 'open' key, the door only whined.

He glanced at the fire as a chemical tang different from that of smoke filled the air.

**Bao-Dur saw the **two-legged Imperial machine with different eyes, as he looked up in the split second before it trained its guns on him. He noted that it walked via thick hydraulic tubes, that simple metal struts kept the heavy square cockpit from falling between the legs, that its parts were more roughly made and more visible than those used on the Mandalorian machines he had once studied.

Then, the Force, not overwhelmed by danger of any magnitude, warned him that something new and big was coming his way.

He leapt, Force-flinging himself over the Anzat woman as the Imperial walker began to stalk toward both of them. It twitched and stood still for a moment before the pilot pushed it into a halting run as a column of smoke flared down from space behind it, dwarfing the silver spaceship that was the smoke's source. The ground rocked, and Bao-Dur opened his eyes without being able to remember when he had closed them. He pushed himself off the ground—couldn't remember being thrown and falling either, but neither had the Anzat woman it seemed, because she was still face-down in the rutted grass, red cloak spread around her like a pool of blood. The crashed ship was a hulk to his right, but he could not focus on that—the walker was still coming, although for a moment it had halted.

Bao-Dur raised his hands and grasped the walker's viscera with the Force. He twisted a tube that halted the flow of power to the lasers and triggered a sparking explosion as energy backed up, but that did not stop the machine from moving. Next, Bao-Dur grasped for its legs and wrenched a hydraulic tube from its socket with a gesture. Spewing smoke, the walker's leg broke and sent the machine crashing to the ground in a series of nauseating jerks. _I'm an _engineer_, _he recanted, as he realized that his lightsaber had been lost somewhere in the fall. There—the silver haft laying on the ground a few steps away. There—a Force presence blossoming in his mind—Mical was in that ship that had crashed a moment ago? There—the Anzat was on her feet and running toward him, hunched low toward her wicked knives.

He did not have time for this. Not for not knowing when the portal would be ready, not for this Anzat, not for the Imperial army—

Certainly not for thinking about how Mical would react when she knew about him and Anna, which he would, because Bao-Dur's Jedi training was tattering as he pictured the human and wanted the complication and competition that Mical was to be removed from the galaxy.

But he couldn't act on that. Because he shouldn't, and because the Anzat woman was within striking distance—

That did not mean that the sidestep, and the roundhouse kick that it permitted, were not powered by anger. His leg slammed into the Anzat at her chest level and forced the knives against her own skin on her face and neck. Her face contorted, and she shrieked in pain. Bao-Dur called his lightsaber back to his hand.

She lunged forward, but it was a flailing, desperate lunge with both knives, and he caught the little blades on his lightsaber and slid it forward to scorch her hands. To her credit she did not drop the knives, but began to retreat, her fear bleeding out into the Force. He struck again and they fenced for a few steps, to the downed ship, to the furrow of its passing—

Where, with a final cry, the Anzat lost her footing.

**Mical ignited his **lightsaber and plunged the neon green blade into the door. Acrid smoke was beginning to fill the ship's empty rear compartment. He wanted to raise a hand to put a sleeve over his mouth, but he needed both to push the lightsaber blade in a semicircle through the unresisting door, carving out a chunk of durasteel. When the metal was chewed-looking and glowing orange around the door's three edges he stepped back, deactivated the lightsaber and hung it from his belt, and flung out his arms to _push_.

With a pop and a rush of steam the door's sealed bottom and the lightsaber-scored edges gave in to the Force and tumbled out of the ship onto the charred ground behind it. The sounds of battle, screams and heavy footfalls and laser blasts, filled Mical's ears. The ground behind the ship was partly on fire, but he charged across it. The soles of his boots would protect him as long as he moved quickly--

He moved quickly, coughing the smoke from his lungs, calling out for Anna as soon as his throat cleared. A whorl of the fog of battle swept away from his eyes, and, a split second after he paid enough attention to the Force to hear it tell him that someone he knew was nearby, he saw Bao-Dur.

Mical was just in time for the final moment of battle. He saw someone in red, her Force presence twisted by evil passions, crumbled into the deep ditch dug by his ship's passing. The Zabrak loomed out of the haze in her wake, orange lightsaber raised, and stabbed down. Then the ground crumbled beneath his boots, and the next thing Mical saw was Bao-Dur crouched next to the woman, her life force fading, his lightsaber sunk into her sternum. The Zabrak's teeth were bared, his muscled shoulders hunched; anger had been in him for the killing blow, and it could still be felt.

Fear struck Mical then, because he suddenly realized the source of the anger. It was _love_, a sparking connection between Bao-Dur and Anna, and it had grown while Mical had been away.

His hands tightened on his lightsaber hilt. What else had happened? Bao-Dur looked feral. Had the crew _fallen_, while Mical was away? Would he have to fight now?

Was it his own emotions which were making the world look fallen? Did he, Anna's name still on his lips, want that fight?

He did not think that he was imagining the look of murder in Bao-Dur's eyes.


	31. The Masters Circle At Death's Edge

XXXI

XXXI

The Toydarian, blue wings flapping furiously, pudgy body swathed in mottled green, would have been comical had not the first thing he had done been to fire a Merr-Sonn missile at Anna. It missed and fireballed three meters away, turning a melee of stormtroopers and empty suits of armor at the entrance to the tunnel into a fire-spitting crater. Anna had been assigned to exit the tunnel and fight the Imperials until Gwen was assured that everyone who needed to be was in range for the crystals to be set off, and that Luke was away. She could see him and HK-47 fighting nearby, now his hair now the droid's rifle spitting lasers visible among the chaos. Both had cleared swathes of foes from the land around them, but more Imperials were always coming, and limber, two-legged walking machines were now making their precarious way over the walls into the valley.

It was still hard to fight in what she began to think of as the taint of the light side. She felt clumsy, uncoordinated, as she rolled to keep the Toydarian from fixing her in its weapon's sights. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a stormtrooper, struck peaceful and unresponsive by the natural calmness of the valley that even a non-Force-sensitive could feel, fall onto a suit of armor's rusty blade. The Force was as clear as a cloudless sky–she could sense that Mical had arrived, in a cloud of fear and adrenaline, and that he was even now somewhere on the battlefield.

Preternatural sensation could not, however, help her against the Toydarian's thoughts, which were as slick as the sides of a glass mountain. The tint of alien-ness which spiced Bao-Dur's sense occluded meaning from the Toydarian's, so that Anna could not predict what he was going to do next or whether he was preparing another shot from the rocket launcher that was slung over his shoulder, almost as long again as his body. One person against that, in this chaos, was not going to go well–

She pushed the next missile with the Force, nudging it so that it followed the path of its predecessor and did little more than dig the crater deeper. She was backed against the wall next to the tunnel now, wind making her thankful that her hair was too short to flick across her vision.

She activated one blade of her lightsaber and prepared to leap. She could jump over the Toydarian, perhaps damaging him or the missile launcher in the meantime, and he would not expect it. The launcher took time to reload and ready–

but she was relying far too much on what she was used to, on the life-saving coincidences that came with being able to use the Force to predict one's opponent's actions. She did not consider the fact that maybe the Toydarian would be ready to fire just as she jumped, and that although his aim was not perfect, the hot edge of the explosion as the missile hit the ground below her would scorch her left side.

Her vision filled up with yellow and white as she was thrown out of the air. Pain engulfed her left shoulder. She tried to tuck and roll, to land properly, but her balance was off and so she landed ungainly on the grass, her neck twinging. Nausea heated her throat. She looked back at the Toydarian, realizing that she was a sprawled target now–where was her lightsaber? Pain made her cough and forget reality for a moment, engulfed by searing light, as she moved and stilled, limp against the grass. When next she cracked her eyelids open she saw the Toydarian jolt and wrack, and Luke stepped out of a pall of smoke behind it with a blaster in both hands.

_Thank you _bubbled up into her thoughts, but the pain along her shoulder demanded her undivided attention. She leaned back into it, but unconsciousness captured her only after she took stock of herself and realized where the pain was coming from, realized what the red slickness on the grass below her was–the missile had taken off her left arm.

**Anna was hunched **on the ground like a pale, dead womp rat, her life Force flickering. Battle-noises swamped Luke, but he strode through them, passing the body of the Toydarian as it fell to the ground. He rushed to Anna's side.

A moment later, two new Force presences painted themselves on his mental tac screen. He turned and waved to Gwen, who was slogging toward him over the rutted ground, lightsaber lit in her tensely clenched hand.

"Vader's near," he breathed, when she was close enough to hear.

"I was too late!" she snapped in the manner of a curse as she went to her knees next to the unconscious Anna, as she inspected the red ruin that had been the younger woman's left shoulder and arm. Luke averted his eyes, unused to blood in a modern battle. Breath _tisk_ed between his teeth.

Gwen looked up. "Take her into the cavern and try to stabilize her. The armor won't attack you if you douse your weapon. I'll take care of Vader."

"Don't kill him–"

Gwen's piercing, dark eyes took his stare just as she began to spread healing Force energy into Anna's taxed body. "I'll leave him for you if I can. Go."

She stood, all long-legged cloak-clad body almost glowing against the dark presence Vader carried with him ever closer. Luke holstered his blaster. He bent and lifted Anna at her knees and shoulders, his fingers curling away from her ruined arm but nevertheless coming away crimson. Her weight pushed against his back and legs as he stood up and began to jog toward the cooler, quieter darkness of the tunnel.

Just as Gwen had said, the armored forms ignored him. Some stood in ranks, waiting to replace their comrades, but he pushed past them and set his burden down at the darkest part of the tunnel. Gwen's healing energies melted away from Anna, leaving her a roil of pain and loss. Nervously Luke set his palms against her collar and half-lidded his eyes, _pushed _Force health into her ravaged shoulder.

He needed to get out of the tunnel and face Vader. Gwen could not do what Luke needed to do, to speak to the Dark Lord, to implore and entreat him against his Master–

His mind was thusly occupied, and healing had never been Luke's strength. Energy passed through Anna like water through a sieve, and although Luke tried with renewed focus he gradually felt Anna's pain eke away, replaced with not the sense of a healthy body, but with nothing at all. He might as well have been trying to channel the Force into the ground. Pale himself and noting that the flow of blood from her wound had slackened, Luke sat back on his heels, discouraged, and scanned the Force for Anna.

She could not be found, although her body and her face lay curled inches from him.

He whispered, because he had to get the truth out of him and into the world so that it would not burst him, "She's dead."

**Mical was not **going to back down from the livid glare Bao-Dur was giving him. Phalanxes of the Imperial stormtroopers that Princess Leia had spoken of with such vehemence were jogging toward the downed vessel to investigate. But Mical would wade through them if need be, to reach his Master and find out what was going on–

Bao-Dur extinguished his lightsaber and ran to stand in the ship's shadow next to Mical. The Disciple flinched, and found himself looking up at his fellow apprentice's bemused, calm face, wondering where his fear had come from. _From Anna, _but Bao-Dur acted composed and friendly. Quickly he filled Mical in on their surroundings.

"The final crystal we seek is in this valley somewhere, and the Empire is after us as well as after Gwen Bolwyn and Luke Skywalker. We need to stay and fight until a signal comes that the portal is ready, at which time the ship will come. More than stormtroopers have been sent against us." His gaze drifted to the felled female.

Mical dragged in a smoky breath, his first full one in a time. "It is good to see you alive." Rote politeness was easy.

Bao-Dur looked warily around the corner of the ship. Mical could sense human presences in myrmin numbers beyond. "I was separated from the others. We should move northward and rejoin them."

"Anna is...alive?"

"She is. We will see her."

The Force spoke only of peace for all, an overarching feeling that war and conflict of any sort were challenging to begin on this land, but he needed to press the conversation. "And then?"

The Zabrak, Mical realized, had more maturity than he did; Bao-Dur ignored the hesitant question, flicked a look around the ship's corner, relit his lightsaber, and began to move up the ragged slope to their left. Mical followed. Blasterbolts soon pursued both of them.

**The Bothan who **had once been a Rebel and was now an Imperial with metal spires driven into his brain climbed over the last peak and started down the miniature mountain range surrounding the valley called Infinity.

_I._

_I am._

_I I I I I I I..._

Once, he had been Nant Ai'lya, father, spy, defender of the moral high ground, possessed of the thoughts of a sentient. He was like a broken droid now, six senses jolting–_see paws on dirt, hear shrieks of gunfire, feel gusts of breeze, sense white-light Force flares tasting like sugar drops like touching the sun like me me me me me..._

The only clear trait left to him, the sinews that tightened around his loose, failing skeleton of thoughts, was confidence. Where once he had been confidant in his ability to infiltrate the Imperials, or a criminal organization, and appear to be one of them until he learned what he needed, now he knew that he could do something that few beings in the galaxy could–sneak up on Jedi. He was proud of this ability. Any being looked like a target to him now, a bull's eye to be circled and laughed at inside his selfish, ravaged mind.

Therefore, when the first being he saw was a metallic-skinned humanoid gleefully roasting stormtroopers with a flame thrower, the weapon that had once been Nant Ai'lya went into search and destroy mode.

His green clothing let him duck low to the grass and stalk like a sandpanther. He felt the skin of the back of his ears touch the back of his head, cool compared to the heat-waved air. Then _I I I I I _became the turning over and tasting of _target _to an undiscerning palate.

Slowly he stood up as his target turned its back, orange flame licking grass blades in its wake. He unslung a blaster carbine from its holster across his broad chest and took aim.

A moment before he pulled the trigger, the target, without turning its photoreceptors toward him, pointed one hand at him and unleashed a spray of bullets from a hold-out blaster that appeared there. No matter whether the gun was built-in or the droid was duel-wielding firearms; a bolt speared through the Bothan just below his sternum. He dropped to the ground. For a moment _pain _eclipsed both _target _and _I,_ but then a second target blossomed in his awareness. This one, not the droid, was the source of the delicious Force-power!

The Bothan clutched his wounded side and, with a tenacity which would most likely have been impossible for one of his species not made fearfully single-minded by augmentations, began to crawl toward the dark cave at the valley's northern apex. 

**At the first **glimpse Gwen got of Vader, of the tall, black-clad form pushing through his dwindling troops and through the detritus of battle like a juggernaut, she thought of herself. What appeal did masks and cloaks of night hold for those with enough power to be called Dark Lord to match their mantles? Every armored footprint felt like the mark of a god upon its world...

"Do you think I chose this, Revan?" Vader's voice came as a susurrus through the metal grill. "Fool. Not only did you forfeit the power of the dark, but you never learned to endeavor to _understand_ your enemies." A crimson lightsaber flared in his hand, the haft dwarfed by thick gloves, as if he were stooping to her level by fighting physically and with the ancient weapon of the Jedi.

"There you are wrong," Gwen replied, circling. Two of her steps made up for each one of his. Stormtroopers had vacated the area around them, fearful of their own master. The light Force permeation of the valley protested Vader's presence, but he fought through it effortlessly, like a reek through a barbed-wire fence.

Gwen said, "To understand my enemy, I must only understand my own capacity for evil."

"I am surprised you are so simple," said Vader, and even as she dug into his thoughts for the source of his words he swung at her, a wide sweep of scarlet. She met it with her twin sabers, guiding his blade into an angle with the point over her shoulder and supported by her shoto blade. He draw back ponderously. She darted in, but with a step and a swung he blocked her strike even as he appeared languorous and slow. More ships began to overshadow the grass, and Gwen realized that she ought bring the _Hawk _in soon.

She sensed Luke a short moment before he dashed out of the cave, lips drawn away from his teeth in a rictus of stress, and halted near her, feet moving in place as he looked between her and Vader. The Sith seemed to grow taller as Gwen watched, and fixed his gaze on Luke as if from a high mountain. He was going to speak, but, knowing or not, Luke interrupted.

"Anna is dead!"

Denial washed through Gwen for a moment, then reality asserted herself and she scrambled to reorganize her plans. "Gather everyone," she said. "Call the ship."

Luke had programmed the _Hawk_'s frequency into his commlink. Gwen heard him snatch it to his mouth and call for Carth as he backed away, thoughts fixated on Vader.

Then, completely without warning, a beast-mouthed humanoid figure rose out of the grass and grasped Luke's legs. With a cry the young Rebel fell, and rose again quickly, but he was in a wrestling contest with a creature that, it seemed to Gwen, had no Force presence at all–

and she had her own foe to occupy her. Vader raised his hands to stab down at her, appearing taller than ever, and Gwen darted beneath his arms, ready to stab into his chestplate. But quicker than he could have moved his blade he dropped one hand from the hilt and drove his arm beneath her upraised sabers and nearly beneath her ribs. She walked forward into the durasteel bar of his arm–it flung her backwards, the breath agonizingly knocked out of her. Only a half-instinctive pulse of the Force that propelled her further away from Vader than his attack would have saved her from the red saber coming down like a guillotine a moment later. She surged to her feet, any vengeful anger wiped away by the peace of the Force that came so easily here, and realized that this physical contest was neither going to get either of them killed nor allow either of them to succeed.

Vader was drawing energy to him, slow as it was in this bastion of the light, preparing something worthy of the conflict between two Masters of the Force. She set her sabers into guard, knowing that he would not attack at this moment, and delved into the Force, into Vader, to find out what he strove for.

It was gravity he manipulated without his heavy hands. He was going to drag a ship out of the sky.

But there in his mind she knew more too, and realized what he had meant in the first lines of their conversation.

He had been a Jedi once, as she had, and the black suit was irrevocably tied to his conversion to Sith not because he had chosen it to symbolize the blackening of his soul, but because no longer could he live without it. Just as Princess Leia had mentioned, something had befallen him that had compelled him into a framework of void-colored raiment. He was a man with strength and history unlike that of any Sith she had ever known or studied, as brilliant at coercion as Malak, as brilliant at leadership as Revan herself, as brilliant at the Living Force as Sion.

But most importantly, he was a man of passions. Her assumption about his appearance had touched one, and so he would bring to bear upon her all the fury of himself, all the raw enthusiasm of his son, all the weight of his pains and fears, beautifully mastered–even here–and molded into a command of the dark side.

The clouds parted as she understood him.


	32. The Dark Lord and the Rogue

XXXII

As soon as he saw the face of his attacker, Luke recognized it. He did not know the Bothan personally, but he had heard of the Empire's cruel experiments which turned sentients to their side by force if propaganda and fear did not sway their wills first. He could easily extrapolate: this Bothan had surely been one of the many of his species who had acted as spies for the Rebellion, using their diplomatic skills and useful connections to infiltrate the Empire. This one had been found out, and...changed.

Changed into something whose Force sense was nonexistent one moment, so that it was as if Luke grappled with an imaginary foe, and inconsistent with his appearance the next, as if the Bothan were an animal wearing a sentient shell.

Why ever had the half-alive Bothan attacked him with its hands instead of the blaster it carried?

Luke writhed, fixed his arm around its neck as it scratched at his eyes and tried to pin him to the ground. He was lurching along the grass on his knees, and the Bothan's cranial spikes were threatening his face now, but he managed to grip his wrist with his opposite hand and complete the chokehold. The Bothan, in front of him now, struggled. He dragged it along the grass, away from Vader.

It sunk claws longer and more ragged than those ever kept by a civilized Bothan into his forearm, and he was forced to relinquish his grip. The Bothan leapt to its feet, one hand rubbing its furred throat. Its shoulders slumped as the combatants found new distance, and for the first time Luke noticed the neat blasterbolt-hole in its green tunic. Matted fur held cloth close to the Bothan's chest there.

Luke did not want to fight a wounded, manipulated being.

"Stop!" He tried to reach out with his voice and the Force. "You don't have to do this." He would use Dun Moch: verbal striving. Yoda had told him the name of that traditional Jedi art, but Luke knew what it really meant: convincing your foe, through words and intent, to not be your foe any more. Would it work on this reconstructed being? Luke could sense the metal neural taps like slashes through the Bothan's soul. "You were on the good side, once."

The Bothan did still, and seemed to struggle within himself. His fingers clutched one another.

Luke extended the Force like a conciliatory hand.

"I…uhn…I…mustn't."

Luke's hand of thought stretched forward, like a child reaching forth to stroke an unfamiliar, wary animal. It smoothed the pale fur on the Bothan's forehead and explored the cruel antennae.

The Bothan could not, Luke learned, turn against the Empire. If he somehow overcame his conditioning and felt another loyalty, even loyalty toward self-preservation, the resultant pressure on his neutral taps would ruin his brain.

"Twelve days," said the Bothan, and the Force warned Luke a second before the Imperial pushed himself to his feet with one hand and unslung his heavy blaster with the other. Luke darted behind him before the Bothan could shoot, and pulled out his own blaster. Two shots ploughed through the camouflaged tunic.

The Bothan dropped to his knees, fading fast, speaking, and Luke leaned close to hear the frantic words.

"I had…and I waste it all."

Regret and guilt washed through the Force. _Twelve days to live, _Luke realized. And then Nant Ai'lya was released into the Force, and for a second the implants thought on in his place. _I…I…_but they could no more reach their target than Nant could, and Luke broke their Force connection as the Bothan died.

Luke sat back on his heels, as unable to hear the battlefield clamor as if his ears were covered. He would have to use Dun Moch on Vader too, to try and weave the string of blood that bound them into a rope to pull Vader to the light. But both Vader and the emperor knew more about the Force than Luke did. He wouldn't be able to smooth Vader's rumpled thoughts the way he had the Bothan's. And even if his voice of reason succeeded as best it could, would someone still have to die, like the Bothan had?

The prickle of danger—stormtroopers, and TIEs incoming—broke him out of his thoughts. He stood, pulling the blaster, a more powerful model than his Rebel issue, from the Bothan's limp hands.  
He kept low and darted for the cover of a downed, smoldering AT-ST. He heard a slight shift of the engine-noises on the wind, but the Force clarified, telling him that Carth Onasi was near.

The _Ebon Hawk _was coming.

**Anna dimly remembered **Luke murmuring, "She's dead."

No! Not Gwen!

But when Anna took stock of herself, she knew it must be her who had passed on. She could taste the copper-coin tang of blood in her mouth as thoroughly as if her face had been painted with it. She could clearly remember what had happened to her last—the loss of her arm, Luke's concern—and knew that most soldiers who had survived things as bad as that injury had memory loss afterward due to trauma. And she knew that either the injury was enough to have overwhelmed her nervous system or she was dead and had no body to feel, because, pleasantly enough, she didn't hurt.

Then a familiar person appeared in her field of vision, as if he were looking down at her: dark hair, unblemished face, rib-shouldered jacket.

Atton.

_I understand_, flowed Anna's last conscious thought for a while. _I've died and gone to a hell._

**Both Gwen's and **Vader's thoughts were on the sky now, because he wanted to throw a ship at her, and she had just noticed that there was one she really, really, didn't want him throwing.

The _Hawk _was up there, a gold-and-silver disk containing the people that Gwen cared most about in the galaxy. It 

flipped and juked, taking out the twin-hulled TIEs that tried to prevent its landing. Those bombers had been more a show of force than anything else so far, because the Rebels had been individual and the Imperials _en mass_. However, the TIE Bombers could now bring their arsenal to bear on Gwen's ship.

Carth and the others were repelling them adequately, spear-storms of lasers chasing the smaller ships away. Soon they would be able come around to land.

But Vader wasn't summoning the _Hawk_. Instead, a fin-winged Lambda, an escort craft slightly modified from its shuttle origins, broke off from a straight flight path and screamed toward the ground where Revan stood. Its pilot's fear shot through the Force like pain. In no time at all it spread its wings farther in either direction than Gwen could possibly run to escape it. Scant meters from the ground, the pilot frantically applied every braking mechanism he had.

Gwen did not have to fake anything to give Vader the impression that she was frightened. However, she had had more than enough time to make a plan.

As the ship's nose loomed, she summoned the Force to jump, flung herself backwards, and landed perfectly balanced on the white slope. The ship caromed forward toward Vader. With a calm like the crushing, still depths of the ocean, he rose and floated as if his wide, black cloak were wings. He landed on the ship's nose with a _thunk_, as firmly as if his soles were magnetized grippers. The Lambda pilot cut the engines.

The ship tore through the grass and dirt, metal creaking, and its Force-sensitive passengers wavered and found their footing again seconds before the Lambda rocked to a halt. Darth Vader's lightsaber slashed at Gwen's shoulders. She ducked.

Her hands flashed out; underside-of-new-leaf green blade, sunset-violet blade. Vader caught both strikes and swung them away from his body. He did not release a hand from his weapon's hilt to clench, but she felt the Force choke take her throat. She resisted; it loosened. Vader was not like Malak, weak in that he needed to draw energy from captives to face her. She would not easily forget Vader's durasteel grip.

Gwen angled to the left. They fenced for a few paces on the nose of the ship, Vader ponderous and as indestructible as a wall, Revan dancing, the hem of her Jedi robe nipping at her heels. Then her feet touched the viewport. The pilots inside looked up, awe- and fear-struck. Vader swung, roaring a wordless battle-cry.

She tried to Force push. He stole her energy away, but in the split second while he did it she ducked and rolled away from the viewport that he had backed her up to. Her Force energy fed a push that knocked her off the ship and onto her back.

Jarring pain ached through her shoulders, but she had landed properly on the grass. She leapt to her feet.

If the Exile really was dead—that information was not coming readily to her through the Force, and she wasn't going to stop and concentrate right now to find out—then, according to the Rakatan holo, the portal back to her home time would not open. But that did not mean that one of the most powerful Force-users in history was not going to make it a priority to try.

She just needed to disentangle herself from Vader.

Again he did that still-legged flying jump, and for a moment was silhouetted above her against the bright blue sky. She dodged to the side. He landed and paced toward her, saber low and humming.


	33. Allies and Foes

XXXIII

When Anna next creaked open her sleepy eyes, the pain was back, burning like a lightsaber blade lain across her left side from neck to thigh.

Atton was back too.

Floundering in her uncertain status, she worked her mouth to see if it could move. It could. She was lying on her right side, her hip aching against the hard ground. Vivid red blood, that shocking scarlet that she had almost forgotten since the wars, had soaked the dressing tied around the wound on her shoulder, but it was indeed dressed in a sleek bota poultice. Standard medpacs carried such things along with the health stims that she knew so well, but more complex treatments needed more time and care than a stim provided. Atton had wrapped her shoulder skillfully.

And beyond her shoulder? Frightening, frustrating _air_ where her arm should have been.

Her Zeison Sha armor had saved her body from most of the blast from the Toydarian's missile, but her skin felt burnt and tender. Just above her hipbone the armor's scales had been fused into her skin and then cut away in places, revealing angry red and unhealthy gray skin. Darth Sion's skin, it seemed, on her body.

He too had thought her beautiful…

"I'm…alive?" she asked Atton.

"Yeah." He looked stunned, and a little relieved.

"Luke said…I was dead." Her thoughts were hard to verbalize.

"I'm pretty sure I know what a dead Jedi looks like."

"Thank you. I…you came for me, even though you spurned the Jedi." She did not want to say how surprised she was to see him. She had suspected that he had fled from memories of her as far as possible, not endeavored to rescue her, even if she had spoken to him through supernatural means on Dantooine.

"Hey, you spurned the Jedi for a while too!

Look, I…I loved you from the moment I first saw you. Thought you were a dream. I tried to play it off as a joke. I guess it wasn't very funny."

The scathingly honest reference to Atton's days as a torturer plus his touching, soft spoken admittance acted like a stim to Anna's weary thoughts. She sat up.

_So many thought me beautiful. What if it's not me that is, but the nexus in the Force? What if I don't deserve to say "thank you" and think about the consequences? I loved him once, in a way, in the simplest of the complicated days._

Instead she said, "How did you get here?"

"A Jedi Master from this planet showed me the portal." He gestured, and Anna realized that she was back in the tunnel, near the crystal in its socket. _So close_, she thought. _I could achieve my goal now, if only I knew that everyone was ready. I'll have only one chance, before I am taken back, and who knows if we can come back without me drawing us here like I drew Atton._

"Hey," he was muttering, "it could have been worse. You could've woken up saying somebody else's name. But really, I would've liked a 'at least you're kinda cute, Atton'."

She wondered with a start if she would know if Bao-Dur were dead. Their Master-Padawan bond had splintered from disuse, and this planet was too strange for her to be sure of their new one—

"Well, that's not the way you'd move your lips to say 'Mical'," Atton quipped, and Anna glared at him. Into the silence he said, "Selfishness does not become you, Anna. I want to bring you, and whoever you were here helping, back into the world I understand."

"You're right." She struggled to her feet, working around the pain that movement brought. "We must gather the others."

"You're gonna walk into a battle in that state? I'll go."

"Accompany me then."

He held up a fistful of stim needles.

She pressed one after another to the veins on her thigh, the movement so familiar. Some pain faded; some energy returned.

They headed for the tunnel's entrance.

**Darth Vader stalked **toward Gwen.

She was in a dilemma; she needed to get away and gather the others as well as see to Anna, but could not dispatch Vader quickly. He, likewise, probably had an excuse for not going all-out; he wanted Luke alive. Both of them were constrained by the effort of preserving and working with people around them. Gwen had already decided to try and take the ship sitting before her so that Luke could use it later, so she could not unleash any ground-damaging Force powers.

But although she had at first assumed that she had more power than Vader, had defeated more powerful opponents and gained more of a mastery of the Force, further exploration of him shook her resolve. He was more inexperienced than her, possessed of less finesse and of the delusions of the dark side. No lifeblood flowed though his cyborg hands, restricting his use of Force powers as well as of simple dexterous movement. His bones were durasteel, but in the realm of the Force, that made them weaker, not stronger.

However, Vader_ resonated_ in the Force with a verve that surprised Gwen because of its familiarity. Like Anna, he was a nexus of the Force. Lines of influence converged on him and careened off, touching the entire history of the Jedi and Sith factions as well as the political situation of the galaxy. He was…essential, tied into the Force of this day as surely as Ba-ion was tied to its sun. She did not know its source or have a name for it, but he was like a dark shadow twin of Anna, not drawing people to him but rather instilling fear in them, less physically hale and more mentally sure than Anna. He was…special to the Force.

And that gave him power which Gwen hesitated to throw herself directly against.

But she flourished her sabers and took the fight to him. Lightsaber-sounds, shear and sparking, filled up her ears. He raised his saber for a ponderous downward strike and she spun to his back, her cloak flaring and almost touching his black mask. He stepped backwards and blocked her stab at his shoulder with the thick padded armor of his upper arm. As fast as he jerked away again, her saber did not sink through the limb entirely, but sheared a gash three-quarters of the way in, deep enough for her to see silver and wires instead of flesh and blood. He was a cyborg, and not afraid of using that to his advantage.

He finished his spin and cut toward her head. She ducked; he kicked her shin. Her thick, knee-high boots protected her somewhat, as did previous training, but widespread pain in her shin elbowed through her mental blocks like a Hutt pushing through the crowds at a free meal. He hit her in the face then, with the palm of one hand, and she flew backwards.

But the Force still came easily to her call. As she landed she caught Vader in the embrace of a Force whirlwind. He shouted, a deep groan like strained metal. She leapt to her feet and dashed forward, slashing at him with both sabers as she spun. He moved away from her strikes as much as he could, fuming in the Force, and she found herself raking his cloak more often than she would like. But he was also unafraid of damage to the surface of his artificial limbs, and he moved them as if to protect his chest and head. Each of his arms and legs had gashes in them by the time the whirlwind faded, and his neck was also scored, a triangular saber-bite taken out of his flared helmet. As soon as he staggered to a solid stance again, his left knee bent backwards slightly so that she knew that her saber had touched his artificial knee but unfortunately not shorn off the leg, she aimed for his hands.

She took off the first two fingers of his right hand before he brought his lightsaber to bear again and without finesse pushed it toward her face, forcing her to block with both of hers and to concentrate lest her own blades touch her skin. Then, quicker than the Force registered and clouded with the all-pervading wrath of the dark side, she felt herself lurch as the impossibly uncomfortable not-pain of electric shock coursed through her side.

She jogged backwards, realizing by his immobility that he had touched her just below the ribs with his mangled hand. White sparks jumped from the round stumps of severed metal fingers.

She could sense his weakness, and his longing to speak. He did not, though, because he had come up against a Force user that he suspected was more powerful than any he had ever encountered. But he also was arrogant at heart, and would not fail. He drew much from his violent recovery. For a moment, they looked at one another.

The _Hawk_ inadvertently saved her from having to decide what to do next. It set down in the midst of the valley, engaged with one TIE Bomber. A glancing laser scored a furrow in the ground almost from the _Hawk _to the Lambda. When Vader was obscured by the rising smoke, Gwen jumped backwards a few steps and ran.

It was inglorious, she knew. But she could not delay to fight Vader—not even to finish him—when her priority was to the crystals and her crew.

And she had promised Vader to Luke.

**Bao-Dur and Mical** saw Luke and HK-47 at the same time that they fully realized the magnitude of the resources that the Empire had arrayed against them.

They were following the very rim of the valley, where not many stormtroopers had been. A stream followed the curve of the mountains' feet. The yellow and green grasses grew high here, so that sometimes the two Jedi apprentices splashed through the sun-sparkled water, Bao-Dur's heavy-soled boots protecting him from the swampy liquid, and sometimes they waded through grass.

But then they neared the cave entrance near where Bao-Dur had been fighting before he had veered off with the Anzat. They were forced to crouch to conceal themselves from the columns of stormtroopers rappelling into the valley.

Mical's hands on the ground next to Bao-Dur rustled the grass, and the human flinched when the Zabrak raised a bladed hand to signal silence. Fear, or perhaps it was more aptly called nervousness, made Mical's mien feel brittle.

Bao-Dur didn't particularly care about the fact that Mical was a potential rival for Anna's affections. She had chosen, and now would need to choose again. He would not fail to protest if she chose Mical, but that decision had not been made yet, and he hoped that Mical would not do something lives-threatening just because it was impending.

Mical silently pointed to the left, and Bao-Dur looked in the thusly indicated direction.

The _Hawk _had landed, steam shooting from its struts.

Bao-Dur whispered, "We must rejoin the others."

Troopers, a cloud of white, had surrounded Luke and HK-47. Both looked like they were itching to fight, but didn't like the odds. Bao-Dur didn't like them either.

Mical whispered, "Jedi have prevailed against worse." With strong conviction in his voice, it would have been inspiring had not Bao-Dur been sure that there must be a caveat somewhere. There always was with war. Who had failed in order to prompt that legendary Jedi's success?

But he could think of no better choice. Their thoughts in tandem, he and Mical slunk forward.

It struck Bao-Dur how the tens of troopers hesitated in moving against one Jedi and one droid. These Imperials were no brave Mandalorians. Admittedly, HK-47 looked and sounded every piece the killer, red eyes glowing, blaster steady, insulting the Imperials steadily. But it was Luke upon whom the troopers' attention was focused, as the young Jedi stood with one hand on the trigger of a long blaster and the other held loose, fingers spread, ready to unleash Force powers far more threatening than the firearm.

But when Bao-Dur and Mical, lightsabers blazing to life, turned the outside edge of the circle into a fray, the tense truce dissolved. Bao-Dur sliced a trooper in half and turned toward another. His lightsaber turned its blaster's muzzle into sparks. No, these were no Mandalorians. But there were _a lot_ of them.

* * *

**A/N: Atton's sappy dialogue ("I loved you…wasn't very funny") was written by BioWare writers, not me, for a deleted scene in KOTOR2. **

**I had a dream about this story last night which involved the forest moon of Endor, Jude Watson, second person, and the Exile in a pith helmet. Silly as it may be, it's one of the first dreams I've ever had about my fanfic and I'm sorta proud of it. Heh. **


	34. A Disturbance and an Acceptance

XXXIV

And so Anna charged into the fray with Atton at her heels like she had so many times before, except that this was not like those times. With the stimpacs and the Force-high of this place, where the Light was as thick as oxygen in the air, she knew that she could get hurt and not even notice it, and in her current condition that hurt could be fatal.

But she had to give something back to those who loved her.

The first two stormtroopers to turn to look at her were slain by a sweep of her double saber. (Luke must have retrieved it from the ground after it flew out of her hand when the missile hit, but it was Atton's warmth she felt on the hilt, because he had handed it to her in the cave.) Other Imperials took notice and she met them toe-to-toe, running, wheeling the thrumming azure sabers as best she could in one hand, catching troopers up in Force storms and whirlwinding them until her blades found flesh.

She breathed in easily, channeled the Light, eschewed vengeance. Some Imperials, she noticed, simply wandered away from the cave entrance, spurred by the aura of pacifism. Anna's weapon struck a trooper at every twirl, even though she herself was unbalanced and fuzzed by stims. Her single, gloved hand seemed fused tirelessly to the metal hilt.

Atton shot the troopers that Anna left alive, face set and serious.

Finally she cut through the throng and reached Luke and HK-47. A half-circle of grass was empty in front of the young Jedi and the assassin droid. Although sweat streaked his forehead and his cheek muscles twitched into grimaces as he looked around to take aim, Luke kept the troopers in front of him at bay. He and HK-47 shot tirelessly into their midst, felling enough that the multitude was noticeably thinned. Anna could feel disgust in Luke's Force sense; he reviled this prolonged, personal warfare.

A trooper sneaking quietly toward HK-47, black blaster tucked close to his armored chest, registered on Anna's Force awareness. She spun, kicked his armored knee with her armored foot, caught the blasterbolt he fired toward her leg on the length of her saber and deflected it back into his chest. He collapsed. Luke flicked a glance toward her.

He did not show his surprise; he must have sensed her, and known that his proclamation of death had been false. No time to dwell on it now.

"Tell the others to get to the ship," she said, quickly, loudly over HK-47's myriad insulting battle cries.

"What about you?"

"I'm going back to the cave to activate the crystal."

"Who's he?" Luke glanced at Atton before leaning to the side and taking out two advancing troopers. Light saturated softly in his mind, and he looked to the left—the presences of Mical and Bao-Dur registered clearly to Anna in that direction too.

"A friend."

And a new Force sense blossomed in Anna's mind—Gwen, coming this way. Anna projected her own presence and received a slurry of emotions in return, but confirmation above all. Everyone was gathering, now, and the _Ebon Hawk _had landed. Anna could return to the crystal's alcove, activate its power, and, since she was the nexus in the Force, send the _Hawk _to its home time too, sparing the representatives of the Rebellion and the Empire.

Simple. Except that she didn't know what she was going to say to Bao-Dur or Mical or Atton or Revan when they were in quietude again, and she didn't know what controlling time travel was supposed to feel like, and the world was going a bit woozy and why was Atton touching her? She shrugged his hands away, and he held them up red with blood.

He was speaking, but he sounded far away.

**Luke saw Bao-Dur** and Mical pushing their way toward him, and saw the stormtroopers retreating toward their waiting machines. The combined work of Jedi had driven them off. Or had they simply been ordered to fall back and allow Vader through? Because there he was in Gwen's wake, as solid as the ground beneath Luke's weary feet, as dark as space.

"You heard her!" Luke's own voice surprised him with its rough, panting affectation. He shouted up at HK-47. "Everyone to the _Hawk_." _I need to get away from here—and take Vader—take my father—with me._

"May the Force be with you, meatbag…you're going to need it."

Anna swooned behind him, and her dark-haired rescuer looked up with fear and determination in his eyes. She trusted him—so Luke listened when he said, "Get going!"

The Force propelled Luke faster than he thought he could go, faster than he wanted to, toward Vader, in leaps and sprints. The Dark Lord simply waited for him, standing there in the long grass, the peace of the valley sloughing off him like sand off a farmstead's static-guarded entrance. Luke thought frantically as he landed in a skid a few meters away from Vader. What to say? What to do? He had to lead the Sith away—

Luke paced along the grass, human-slow now. In the distance, Gwen looked toward a crashed ship, a Lambda down beside the _Hawk. _It, she sent, contained hope. He could get offplanet."Come, father," Luke said, "I've been thinking about your offer."

**Bao-Dur ran across **the plain, dodging the bodies of stormtroopers on the ground, Mical slightly ahead of him and gaining distance.

Revan too beat him to the ramp. Bao-Dur stamped up into the ship, glancing behind him to see HK-47 –did the droid look _disappointed_, in the lack of enemies?—following him onto the ramp. Reaching into the Force, he found Carth and Revan in the cockpit, ready to close the ship up and depart. How close they had all grown, throughout this adventure…Anna was still out there, and although he knew that she needed to be where she was, the hurt he could sense in her Force presence was daunting. And _Atton_—why was he here? If he harmed her—if he distracted her--!

"Move along, meatbag," HK-47 said petulantly beside Bao-Dur.

With a sigh, the Zabrak did so, moving aside to let the droid pass. The ramp slid up, and the door over it closed. Bao-Dur did not take his eyes from where the cave had been.

**"You have to **_live._" Atton hit her, pain from his palm striping across her face, and Anna looked up. She could not feel her legs, could not conceive of moving. The crystal in its socket was before her, and Atton was saying "You have to do this." He must have carried her back to the cave…she must have fainted.

She remembered her mission. Put the four crystals together. Get everyone—except Luke—back to her home time. Those things were essential. Her hair in her eyes, Atton's warmth against her side, the utter lack of pain _and _feeling—these were not.

She was not sure what to do. But she dug into her belt pouch and clumsily held the crystals in her right hand, and leaned forward. She dropped them, one after another, onto the claw-shaped bracket. Where they touched one another, they stuck, and a flare of light bloomed—she could not tell if it was only behind her eyes.

When a tower of crystals had formed, the universe opened itself to her.

Time was simple. Time, no matter how many side streams diverged from the river of years and aeons, was a straight line. She simply needed to, with the net of her mind, catch her destination—one she could identify as easily as she could taste the difference between one flavor and another. With a twist of thought, she captured the essence of the age of the Jedi Civil War and bade it come to her.

Prideful Time demanded its own way. And so, instead of coming to her, it brought her to it, just as she had wanted.

She captured the _Hawk _in the net too, giving to this encompassing aspect of the Force-universe the signatures of all the people inside, and the memories of every moment she had spent in those memory-laden halls and rooms. She felt it travel. She felt herself and Atton follow, falling into the well of Time, toward a familiar, comfortable landing.

But she also felt the Force rise, encompassing her, reluctant to let her go.

Weak, but utterly happy, she let it have its way.

**"You have made **a decision?" Vader rumbled. Circling with him, Luke noted the nicks in his armor, the missing fingers on his hand. So, Gwen had faced him. Luke wondered how much they had known about one another, these Sith from different ages.

"I have. I'm going to remain loyal to the light side."

He backpedaled, toward the downed Lambda, but Vader charged him, lightsaber swinging. Luke's blaster seemed utterly ineffective. The young Jedi threw himself backwards, into a Force-assisted handspring that made up half the distance to the Lambda. As Vader followed, slower but arcing toward Luke with the surety of a stooping raptor, he backpedaled further.

But his father's voice boomed. "Then the emperor will deal with you," Vader said. "Even you, Skywalker's son, cannot withstand the troops I have standing ready here."

But Luke had a feeling that he wasn't going to need to. He fingered a device he had added to his arsenal from the stores of the _Ebon Hawk_, something he had been saving for a moment when its use would not simply open up a gap for new foes to flow into. A plasma grenade.

As soon as he could, realizing too late that Vader must surely have intuited the move perhaps before Luke planned it, he armed the neon-orange sphere and threw.

It exploded in front of Darth Vader, releasing a splash of fire that warmed Luke's back as he ducked and ran toward the Lambda.

**The Lambda's pilot**, his noise broken and bleeding from the crash, was jarred and confused. No orders had come through for the aerial forces to take action, but here he was, sitting on the ground, pulled by Lord Vader's Force in a move more surprising and frightening than any rumored choking. His co-pilot had restarted the engines after the strained landing, but was it safe to fly now? The Lambda's pilot liked going by procedures, and was not sure whether lifting again after Vader had pulled the ship down counted as disobeying an order or not.

So he was very reassured when a request for entrance, a bright yellow light on the console, came from the Lambda's entranceway. He keyed the door open. Surely this was Lord Vader, requesting an exit from battle! The pilot told his co-pilot that he was going to greet Lord Vader, and to get the ship ready to depart.

At the door, he saw a black-clad figure far thinner than Lord Vader. He had only a moment to glimpse a human face before the butt of a blaster smacked him across the temple.

**Darth Vader could **have captured Luke before the Jedi achieved the relative safety of the Lambda. He could have caught up and taken another hand from his son, crippled the boy until he stilled and allowed himself to be shown to the Emperor—He had moved just outside the radius of the plasma grenade, untouched by the gouts of fire it spat. He had to walk around the steaming, burning pile it left behind, but he still could have jumped, could have pushed his metal limbs to the limit and caught his son.

Except that, as Luke disappeared into the ship, the Force was rocked by a tearing disturbance. Vertigo swept over Vader, and he swung his head to follow the sudden movement out of the corner of his eye—the Jedis' ship dissolving, rust-colored metal blending into the pale blue sky, like a fade-out on a holovid.

Stranger than that, Darth Vader was stuck with a memory from his days as Anakin Skywalker. His one weakness, the one distraction he could not be immune to, these memories sometimes appeared and wracked his thoughts, in quiet or traumatic moments when he least expected them. Now, he suddenly smelled the sterility of the Archives in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. With a flash of long-unused memory he recalled studying, sitting beside a brown-haired boy his own age and digging through information for facts about history—

Because this disturbance in the Force felt like Time.

And so Darth Vader was caged inside Anakin Skywalker's memories for a moment, as the _Ebon Hawk _disappeared and Luke took the helm of the Lambda. As the Imperial ship lifted off, its smog returned him to himself.


	35. A Wedding and a Funeral

XXXV

Every place of learning, Revan thought as she stepped out of the _Ebon Hawk_, should have wild, running water nearby. There was something freeing about the flowing stream that she could hear in the distance, and it pleasantly reminded her of the clear river that ran over rounded rocks on its way past the Jedi Enclave on Dantooine.

The sunlight of Ba-ion, younger now by four thousand years than when she had last seen it, looked just as it had before. There had been no sensation of movement as they traveled through time. Carth had experienced nothing at all during the transition, except to see Gwen's faraway look as in the Force the universe rearranged itself. When she, Carth, Mission, and Zaalbar had stepped outside again, the valley had spread itself out before them, devoid of the noise, crowds, and detritus of war, but otherwise unchanged. Was that unusual, geologically speaking? She wasn't sure, but thought that if the Force were to preserve any place for its own purposes, it would be here.

Sadness wormed into her at the thought of never seeing Luke again and never having said a proper goodbye. It was acceptable to forget personal things in the flurry of war, but…there had been much she'd wanted to tell him. Much hope she had wanted to instill in a lonely Jedi.

The valley looked smaller without so many lines of sight obscured. She could clearly see three people emerging from the cave mouth across the wild lawn; an alien Jedi, Atton Rand, and Anna. The Exile lay limp in Atton's arms, her shoulders and knees supported by him, her visible shoulder covered in wrappings and blood.

Mical and Bao-Dur pushed past Gwen and ran down the ramp, the former stumbling and the latter a juggernaut. Gwen jogged forward to keep up with them. Their maelstrom of emotions and the quiet darkness in Atton boded ill.

The blue-skinned and head-tailed alien Jedi—he was strong in the light side of the Force, Gwen sensed, but she did not know his name—stepped back, confused by the passion with which the three men formed a loose circle around the some-time Exile. Atton looked close to tears. He spoke in a rush to Gwen when she came close enough.

"The wrappings came undone and she was shot, but she got us here—"

Gwen swept forward and put her hand on the warmth of Anna's neck, feeling for the essential vein. It was a superficial gesture—there was no need to check a pulse in a world of the Force, just as there was no need for someone to die from something as barbaric as blood loss in a world of energy weapons.

The five of them knew, felt it with their six senses, that Anna was dead, and yet felt again when Gwen slowly, hopelessly, drew her fingers away from the paling skin.

Mical reacted first, as quick and violent as a lightsaber activating. He surged forward but stopped short next to Gwen, the overwhelming, impossible urge to protect Anna quivering through his hands, reddening his face. Blue eyes flared like plasma blades. "What have you done?" He raged at Atton. Gwen and the alien Jedi reached out to hold him, but he did not move. He screamed, "What did you try that failed to save her, Atton? You were never good for any of us, and then you fail when she cries for help!"

"Cries for help?" Atton blurted. "I traveled to this vaping planet to rescue all of you, worked my tail off following her—"

"Just to see her _die_, you cur—"

"_War _did this, not me!" He was not sure.

"She was—" Mical choked on tears.

"Vape it!" Atton cursed, looking around as if for someone to hand Anna's body to so that he coul hit Mical. Bao-Dur stepped between the two men, just as Gwen had known he was going to do. He placed one hand on each man's upper arm.

He softly said, "She would not have wanted us to fight over what we cannot have."

Mical threw his weight into a punch that smacked against the Zabrak's chest. Bao-Dur did not move, but simply waited for another strike. None came.

**Gwen cried on **Carth's shoulder as hyperspace streamed past the _Ebon Hawk_. If he shed tears for the Exile, she did not see them, but his Force sense told her well enough that he felt the loss.

After a few quiet hours, she went to Master F'na to learn about the revitalized Order—the Order that Anna had built.

Revan knew well enough that one should not dwell on the past as if some other course could have been taken, but also that sadnesses did not inure one to sadness but simply gathered, formed layers of feeling.

Throughout the journey to Dantooine, Atton busied himself about his ship, covering with oil and coolth and metal the memory of Anna's spiritless weight in his hands. In the _Hawk_, Mical alternately desiccated punching bags and rearranged holovids alphabetically according to director. Whenever Gwen saw Bao-Dur, he was seated on his knees, meditating or dreaming, shoulders slumped.

There was little conversation, and so the present and the future stewed inside them.

**A welcome party **had arrayed for them at the spacedocks just outside the Jedi Enclave. Although Anna had told Gwen of the building's ruination and revival, it was still strange for her to see the subtle differences between this Enclave, which still only loosely covered up some of its scars, and the refuge where she had been trained. But the stream still flowed. As soon as Gwen stepped off the ramp, Bastila enveloped her in a hug. Gwen saw a red-haired Jedi woman catch Atton up in a similar, perhaps more hesitant embrace just before Gwen put her arms around her friend's thin form.

"It's good to see you," Bastila whispered before pulling away and resuming the commanding, confidant tone Gwen knew so well. "Welcome back, everyone. I am immensely grateful for your safe return."

HK-47 exited the ship last, carrying the Exile wrapped in white cloth.

**Funerary arrangements were **made quickly, and Revan found herself surprisingly not good at them. Matching the colors of flowers, procuring outdoor seating for everyone from the Enclave and then some, and ordering a headstone proved not to be among her long list of talents, and so instead she took over some of the business of leading the Jedi. And she found the time for walks around the Enclave with Bastila and Mission.

Gwen told Bastila of her soul-searching and of the adventure in what it was now hard to call the future. After the completion of the story, Mission spoke into the silence.

"Do you think we'll ever see them again? Luke, Han, or Darth Vader?"

"I doubt it," Gwen replied. "There will likely be no trace of them, this far away in time."

"Can't we do something to stop the Empire from coming to power?"

Gwen considered it. It was unlikely that any direct connection could be found in the long span of years between this present and that future. But if there could be…if they found, through the Force or any other means, a crux in history that could save the Republic from that blight...(It was something of a consolation that the Republic would last that long…)if the Empire had never existed, than Anna needn't have died.

And Gwen needn't have met such wonderful, memorable people as Luke, Han, and Leia, or watched moons set over Kashyyyk with Carth.

Gwen said, "Perhaps such things are best left for astrophysicists to ponder."

She would have turned the crystals over to scientists, but they seemed to have stayed in the cave on Ba-ion in Luke's time, leaving the claw in Revan's time empty. Harder had been the decision about what to tell the scientists, politicians, and media of the Republic now that she had returned. Without evidence—the _Hawk_'s computers recorded distance traveled, but not that it had not gone to the planets of the present time, and HK-47 had, to Revan's great surprise, not brought back any weapons—it was likely that anyone she told about the time traveling who could not sense her truthfulness would think she had gone insane somewhere out in Wild Space. Nor would the Republic stand for Revan telling her adventures to only the Jedi and keeping it a secret from anyone else—the galaxy's citizens had suffered far too much at the hands of Force users for a suspicious action taken now to be considered any wise council. And so, she had spoken with Bastila and decided to release a statement that was partly the truth—that she and her companions had been traveling around the galaxy, visiting ancient sites important to the Jedi (and, more importantly, irrelevant to almost anyone else.)

Footsteps clicked in the hallway in front of them, and a moment later Carth appeared, walking confidently toward them. "Gwen?" he said. "I'd like to talk to you for a moment in private."

"Okay." Gwen smiled at Mission and began to follow him.

The bright grin that Mission gave in return had knowing humor in it; it was the same one that she had faced Carth with when he had asked her how best to ask Revan to marry him.

**Atton's door was **ajar, so Bao-Dur let himself in.

It was a sparse room, just like that provided to any Jedi. Yellow light filtered in through the faux-paper walls, mellowing the colors of the floor and the red bedclothes. Atton was sitting on the edge of the bed, his lumpy pack on the floor beside him. His hands covered his face as he curled, elbows on knees, around the sadness and anger roiling inside him.

Bao-Dur quietly said, "Most of the Padawans in the Enclave are disturbed by your distress."

"By the Force!" Angrily, Atton stood. His eyes were bright and raging. "It wasn't my idea to go through this mopek in a place where everyone's psychic!" He stormed toward the door, but Bao-Dur stood so that in the narrow room Atton needed to get past the Zabrak before he could exit. "Excuse me."

Bao-Dur did not move. "I have come to try to help you."

"You'll _helped_ me not kill that Disciple barve enough already."

"We could be united by grief, instead of parted by it."

Atton looked up at him, livid. "Platitudes won't make me believe that you _understand _this grief. I loved her."

"So did I."

"No you…What?" Some anger faded, covered over by a thin cage of confusion.

"I have thought much about this, while Mical enveloped himself in studies of the Force and you…did what? Sat here? When Mical joined our party you quickly made it clear that Anna would have to choose between you and him, and she didn't want to. She wanted friendship with all of us. You didn't associate much with the rest of the crew, and that disturbed her."

Atton retreated and sat down on the bed again. Bao-Dur relinquished the doorway to stand in front of him. "I didn't just want friendship," the human growled.

"That is why she felt uncomfortable choosing. I was the first that she led to the Force. I could sense how she needed strong connections to people to feel happy; if not a strong connection to the team, than a connection to one person, an unreserved trust, not like the bond with Kreia. When she went away where you could not follow, she chose Mical. When he could not follow, she…chose me."

Atton looked up at him from under lowered brows.

"Fight me if you need to," Bao-Dur said evenly. He could see Atton's fingers straying to his holstered blaster. "Zabraks do not battle for females like krayt dragons as easily as humans do. I am making this simple, because I thought that you needed to know…she left Mical for me."  
Atton's hand and the blaster whipped up toward Bao-Dur. For a moment the dark side in the room trumpeted like a dragon, and then Atton squeezed the blaster's trigger.

It clicked without the scream of a laser to follow. Atton followed Bao-Dur's gaze to the floor, where the blaster's power pack still rolled, ticking across the floor, propelled once by the Force and now only by gravity.

"I know that you needed an outlet. And that you didn't need to do something you would regret," said Bao-Dur evenly.

Atton paused, sat down heavily. "What makes you sure? How are you sure that you can go through something….painful and come out yourself?"

"Going through something painful."

For a moment there was silence. Atton dropped the blaster; it bounced slightly on the bed.

"You said you made it sound simple."

_Good_, thought Bao-Dur. _He was paying attention. He may yet gain serenity. _"I can tell you the story of our strange journey."

"Yeah, okay." Shakily Atton followed him toward the door. "You've grown, you know?" the human said. "You're a better Jedi than I knew you as last time we met."

Bao-Dur bowed his head in thanks. "This Enclave fosters the training Anna gave me…that she gave you as well."

The door slid open as the two men exited. Atton looked around and sighed, surprised by the small gaggle of children in the hallway who were looking wide-eyed at his room.

Bao-Dur smiled. "I told you that you were gaining the attention of the Padawans."

**Limat Whitesun, apprentice **to Visas Marr, had never seen so many different types of people in the Jedi Enclave than there were for the funeral of Anna Sacul and the marriage of Gwen Bolwyn and Carth Onasi. The two gatherings were being held about five days apart, so the visitors—Mandalorians, Onderon-born royalty, Wookiees, Republic military and senators—filled the halls and grounds with their light and color for the intermittent time and a few days beforehand. Limat's mind regularly veered from her studies as she saw or sensed someone new walking in the halls outside her classroom or quarters.

When the day of the funeral arrived, Limat was released from her normal studies to mingle with the newcomers and attend the ceremony. She had known Master Sacul only distantly, as her master's second master and as a knight errant in search of both Master Bolwyn and a way back from the place they both had gone, and before that as a member of the Jedi Council far too frighteningly impressive to talk to. Testing the waters of the visitors, though, she heard myriad stories of Anna's kindness, heroism, and devotion. The one-time Exile, one enthusiastic Republic officer said, reformed the Jedi Order that, in the wake of Master Bolwyn's disappearance and the rise of the Sith triumvirate, had crumbled, along with destroying those Sith. She fought with the heart and strength of a dragon, one outgoing but fearsome-looking Mandalorian man told Limat over a cup of caf.

It was Visas who gave her impression of the Exile to Limat last, as all the mourners, on the day of the funeral, filed up a dirt path to the top of the Dantooine plateau where the cairn would be built. "She went through very much under the gift and curse that was her strong connection to the Force. She was hurt deeply, and never showed us the depths of that hurt."

The crowd climbed, with Visas and Limat within it. Clouds were graying in the sky, threatening to squeeze rain out upon the plains; Limat looked around and found a Zabrak crouched on the outskirts of the chairs assembled on the flat top of the plateau for the ceremony, setting up a small force-field generator in case of rain.

Visas sat in the first row, between the handy Zabrak and the Jedi named Mira, and Limat sat one row behind them, next to a brace of other Jedi of various ranks and ages.

Pallbearers carried Master Sacul's shrouded body between the rows of seated mourners. Two human males, Master Bolwyn (Revan—she almost frightened Limat because of her legend), and a bipedal droid carried Master Sacul's slab; Limat belatedly recognized one of them as the once-rogue Atton Rand. There was no music, which she had expected; grief in the Force and Limat's own strong urge to cure suffering minds as she could cure bodies filled the Padawan's senses like a symphony. When the pallbearers reached the front of the aisle of chairs, the slab was set down on its bed of stones and the bearers parted ways, one man to the left and the other to the right. Revan and the droid remained standing in front of the crowd, between the firebrands placed at the four corners of the plinth. To Limat's surprise, Atton Rand took the seat immediately at her right, at the end of the row of chairs.

The crowd had fallen quiet long before now; the former Dark Lord spoke loud enough for all of them to hear. She said, "Jedi Master Anna Sacul did not leave us a will, or instructions for her funeral. She was too young and strong to think that she would die, even with the dangers of her life. She was too powerful, too focused on what to do to help people in the present, to plan for such a future. She did not leave us a will.

But she did leave us with a group of fine apprentices. She left us with the Jedi Order, with this Republic. She left us with peace." Master Bolwyn dipped her head, her lustrous blue-black hair, loosed from its customary ponytail, sliding over one bright eye and the shoulders of her Jedi robe. "And so we give her a Master's pyre, overlooking our beloved home. Her memorial cairn will watch over us, and we will protect it." She paused, then turned partly toward the shrouded body. Slowly she raised her hands. "Anna Sacul lives in our hearts…and she is now, in totality, one with the Force."

The torches rose from their sconces, flaring. They floated, dipped, then fell, and caught on the shroud.

The crowd waited and watched, their grief lowering like the dark thunderheads on the horizon, as the body was given to the land and the wind. Master Bolwyn knelt between the crowd and the slab, symbolically showing the Order's respect for both Anna Sacul and the Force that had taken her life. Liana looked around the crowd and saw not a few tears; perhaps Visas' and the Zabrak's physiologies enabled their dry cheeks, but Rand's were wet with silvery tears.

At the end, when Master Bolwyn melted into the crowd and some low talk began as the beings comforted one another and began to file back toward the Enclave, Atton remained seated. Limat stayed beside him, hesitant in the emotion–filled moment to ask him something as trite as would he move his knees so she could exit the row. He simply sat slumped, as she remembered her most advanced training—that in which the Force could be used to heal not only physical but mental wounds.

Hesitantly she leaned toward him. "Hello, Atton Rand. I'm Limat, remember?"

He seemed to become aware of the world as he focused on her face. "The Padawan healer."

"Yes. I helped you, once. I could try to heal you again…sooth your emotions, if you wanted…I sense great fear in you." She was nervous, and realized how much her last statement had sounded like blatant imitation of a Master.

"No thank you." He had to carefully hold his voice to keep it from cracking. "The healing I haven't done yet, I need to do myself." He stood and moved out of the aisle to join the crowd that was slowly trickling away. Limat paused beside Atton's chair before following him; a movement near the pyre caught her eye.

The Zabrak who had been sitting next to Master Marr was bent over near the back of the slab. As Limat watched, he picked up a flat, white stone from a pile near him and placed it on the bed of ashes. Sadly and reverently he began to build the cairn.

**One person at ** the wedding of Carth Onasi and Gwen Bolwyn did not feel part of the joy that he sensed from the people around him.

There were no set standards for a Jedi wedding, or at least none that he knew. It seemed to be a simple version of a human-style one. The decorations were the white clouds in the sky, the flowing stream, the white pavilions, and the curving walls of the Enclave. The crowd was large and diverse; the one person who was not joyful had secreted himself between a troop of Mandalorians and a pack of Wookiees. The former erupted into cheers as the wife-to-be walked down the aisle with a Mandalorian holding the crook of her arm.

The unhappy watcher doubted that the man was her father; his face was square where hers was aquiline. The watcher supposed that he was a mentor figure, and that she was an orphan.

_What parents would want Revan—_he shut that thought off and looked beyond the gray-armored form at the woman. His pretending to be a caterer and engaging people in conversation before the wedding began had revealed to him that she was Darth Revan redeemed. It was hard to imagine her as commanding armies or surviving in a Sith academy. She wore a white dress and a broad smile, with her hair down, unlike the last time he had seen her. It was hardest of all to imagine her getting married.

The Mandalorian escort left her at the end of the aisle, near where three Jedi Masters, a teenage Twi'lek, and Revan's fiancé stood. The disgruntled watcher had to crane his neck now to see over the heads of the assembly, but he caught the escort whispering something into Revan's ear that made her blush and him grin at her blushing. The watcher would put money on the theory that the Mando had agreed to escort her only so that he could say whatever he had just said about her honeymoon. Certainly not father, then—fellow adventurer.

The watcher sat in silence and not a small bit of boredom as a female member of the Jedi Council read, in Basic and Old Corellian, one of the most ancient known human languages, the passages of literature associated most closely with love and marriage. Bolwyn and Onasi gazed at one another throughout, and the watcher found himself struck with something like jealousy.

So distracted was he by introspection that the morose watcher let a few moments, merely long heartbeats, pass in silence after the Jedi Council member called, "If any being objects to this union, speak now, or forever keep silent."But he recovered himself, and stood up.

"I do. I have things to say before this can go on."

A crowd of heads turned. The one who stood knew that all they would see was a human of medium height and few more than twenty years of age, with short, dark hair and wearing an olive-buttoned shirt. Standing, he was not taller than the Wookiee seated next to him, but the impact of his presence caused Carth Onasi's lips to part as if he had been struck, and then he formed silent syllables that the watcher faultlessly recognized as his own name.

_Dustil._

Then Carth formed sounds that the congregated beings could hear. "My son."

Slowly Carth broke the wedding ritual to walk up the center aisle toward the row of foldable chairs where Dustil stood. The Jedi let him go. The crowd murmured like distant wind. After a moment, Revan trailed after her fiancé.

Dustil had not expected this. Surely there would be an uproar, accusations, cries of "Sith!" But few recognized Dustil and his story, and those who did found themselves enraptured by Carth's progress—and by Dustil's, who followed the Force's emanations of joy from his father and carefully slipped past the cadre of Mandalorians to the center aisle. All Dustil could remember about Gwen Bolwyn was that she had been a fit, direct woman, strong in the Force and exploring the dark side, who had wanted him to turn away from the Sith. Would that have been the better alternative? He would have killed Saul Karath at his father's side, instead of waiting for an opportunity at subterfuge that never came. He could have avoided so many scars.

One gall remained as the Onasis looked at one another as if they had no audience.

"I've been waiting for you to find me since the war ended," Dustil said, and he felt as any child would when its parent has left it alone.

For a long moment Carth's eyes were expressive and his emotions a mélange. Dustil waited for a chiding, for a long explanation, for Carth to look to the almost-stranger he was going to marry.

He did not. He pulled Dustil into a hug. He rasped, "I would have found you if I could. But we've been very far away."


	36. Escapes and Reunions

_Author's note: Thank you very much, all those who have reviewed, alert'ed, or favorite'ed throughout this story's long life, especially __**Jen De Clan **__and __**Promised Flower**__, whose astute reviews have helped me look at my own work in new ways._

XXXVI

**4 ABY**

Luke slammed the joysticks of the Lambda forward. The landscape of Dantooine below pulled away from him as the craft rose, whirring, into the sky. But the smoke and milling stormtroopers and walkers seemed overlaid by another image, one that was burned like a sunflash into his eyes: himself as juggernaut.

He had stormed into the Imperial ship, lightsaber lit, and given the ship's pilots the fright of their lives. "Lord Vader," the co-pilot had murmured after Luke knocked out his superior, pushed the man out of the ramp, and headed for the cockpit. Propelled by his fear, Luke had pointed his blaster at him. As the pilot realized the invader wasn't Vader he also realized that it was nevertheless a very good idea to vacate the ship. Luke had chased the man out and sealed the doors.

The Imperials had feared him, just as if he had been Vader.

That instilled confidence in Luke, just as flying on Duros had. It made him think of regaining Han from the Hutt in a different light than before…by pure intimidation, a language the gangster would certainly speak. It was as if Luke were copying what Vader would do, planning as the Dark Lord would plan, even as the light side was still strong within him…

Vader would walk up to the Hutt and demand his ally freed…

The plan would not be as simple as that at its completion, but with the thought fresh in his mind Luke felt a new confidence. A new mastery, of himself and the world around him. He resisted the urge to label it dangerous. All that was powerful was not dark.

The clouds of Ba-ion embraced the ship as he spurred it upward. No one was tracking him, but behemoth Star Destroyers were waiting in space. He deleted the immediate exit from the atmosphere which was programmed into the navicomputer and curved around with the horizon on manual controls, aiming for the other side of the planet, where fewer Imperial eyes would be watching. When the ship was steadily soaring among the whips of clouds, he typed in hyperspace coordinates and spread his fingers over the levers that would take him out of the Imps' reach as soon as he cleared the gravity well.

He had not seen the _Hawk _disappear, but a taste in the Force told him that time had taken back its own. Gwen Bolwyn would be all right. She was as strong and protective as a mother rancor. She would get her crew home.

Except not Anna. Not as she had been before.

That sadness segued, began to recall the death of Yoda. Luke could have learned so much, if Master Bolwyn and the other Jedi had stayed, or if they had had time to teach him more. He would have to forge his own body of knowledge now, just as he had tried to do after Ben's death.

And again, he was missing more than a teacher; he was missing friends. _My time-traveling siblings-in-arms_, Luke thought, _taught by example._

The skies above Ba-ion opposite the vale of the Force, were clear, and although Imperial sensors brushed by the rogue Lambda they did not have time to hail Luke before the ship disappeared into hyperspace.

**Ships filled with **stormtroopers filed offworld like beads sliding on strings, and, poised on a Star Destroyer above the reverse staging, Darth Vader felt oddly lonely. He turned from the sweeping bridge viewport and retreated into blacker halls, finally sinking to his knees in a room whose door locked in three different ways behind him. It was as secure as a holo-comm room that flung the words of its user light-years across space could be, and today Vader instructed it to call his master.

Emperor Palpatine blossomed into existence, hunched and gnarled inside the blue caging of the holo, his ragged frown seeming to know already what report Vader was going to impart. "How went your mission, Lord Vader?"

"My master, Darth Revan did not turn to the dark side."

The frown slowly twisted. "And Skywalker?"

"He escaped into hyperspace in a stolen ship. Revan and her subordinates disappeared." Vader felt his mask dip toward the floor under its own weight. He was angered and embarrassed by admitting a defeat so far beyond his understanding. "I believe that they traveled back to their time." How Vader rued that they had, according to Fett's recording, taken their method with them!

But, Vader realized, we do not even know whether one can time travel to an era in which one is, already alive.

"I am disappointed in you," the emperor wheedled, and Vader could almost feel the plastic tubes that held his trachea open squeezing in on the burn-scarred natural tissue of his throat. "Return to my ship. I have new plans, which may yet gain us both Skywalker and the extinction of the Rebellion."

"Yes, my master."

The hologram flicked off, and Vader remained kneeling for a moment, ringed by the dimming blue lights of the holoprojector pad.

**Leia met Luke **in the hanger bay of a Rebel cruiser where she had been living. "Don't bother it", she had told the ship's gunners when the Lambda had entered the fleet. They kept the lasers hot nevertheless, but Leia _knew_, and then Luke commed in.

Now, Leia threw her arms around Luke's neck and shouted his name. He smiled sheepishly, touching one hand to his ear while the other patted her shoulder. She pulled away as techs and med droids neared the Lambda and its pilot. Her smile glowed. "Welcome back, commander."

**12 ABY **

Jedi Master Luke Skywalker ducked his head slightly, reverently, as he passed under the shadow of the cave where he had incorrectly pronounced Anna Sacul dead. The Force here was now even stronger, more nuanced and extraordinary, than he remembered, as if with his power its joy had grown. His apprentice hesitated outside the cave, examining the dirt walls that out of the corner of one's eye suggested carvings, but Luke had come for the past, and so he walked on.

A holocron was buried in the wall of the sanctum, one four-planed corner poking out of the dirt wall beside the crystal's socket as if erosion had excavated it just prior to Luke's arrival.

The Jedi wriggled the device free, brushed dirt from the faces. He touched the Force, like a geneticist touching just one strung of the double helix to make recombinant strands braid together.

At first, the holo was only blue smoke, but then it resolved into three figures: Gwen Bolwyn, Carth Onasi, and a young man who had some of the lines of Carth's face under his skin. Luke smiled at the forgotten familiarity of the two he had known, and was also saddened; although in the recording they looked little older than he remembered, they were four thousand years dead.

They looked happy, and more normal than most of the families Luke had ever known. The boy adjusted his collar, nervous as if in front of a relative he had never met.

Gwen spoke, formally at first. "This message is for Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight. I do not know whether it has been, for you, a handful or days or many decades since we last met; for me, it was about a year ago." Her voice softened. "In that time I married, and began to get to know my husband's son, Dustil Onasi. We placed this holocron here, in a place known to you and I, Luke, but to few in any time, so that our paltry goodbye would not be the last you knew of me."

Luke could see that the boy with the hesitant smile, with the happy eyes and stiff lips, was not of Gwen's blood. He remembered that Gwen or Carth had told him about this son, briefly. They all looked happy, although the mergence must have been difficult, since the son had been estranged. But the family was complete now, and in ways Luke envied them.

Gwen did not dwell on herself. She continued, "I wish that you and I, Luke, had had more time to learn about one another, and to train in the Jedi ways I know. You brimmed with power, and controlled it well, with a true spirit of the light side.

Contained in this holocron are recordings of classes held at the Jedi Enclave which Anna founded, my home. Many are about Force powers I thought would be appropriate for you, and some are lessons on history. They will show you not just skills, but methods of teaching as well. "

"Thank you," Luke murmured. The timing was excellent. His academy on Yavin IV was in its fledgling days; its formation, and, previous to that, the series of wars that rocked and formed the New Republic, had kept him from coming to this valley again to commune in whatever way the Force would give him with the beings who had changed his life in the Galactic Civil War.

"I do not know," Gwen continued, resting a hand on her stepson's shoulder. Carth gave a thin smile as he looked at them, and she smiled as she looked at Luke, "whether you are in the process of creating the Jedi Order you spoke of so passionately, but I hope that I have helped you to achieve it, even from so far away. You showed such promise, more than many Jedi of our age that I have known. I wish that we could have known you longer."

The holo faded, and Luke sat back on his heels to sigh for the past. Gwen's voice continued for some final syllables, disembodied.

She said, "Keep from the dark, Luke. As tempting as it may be, we are all too good for it. May the Force be with you."

_Fin. _


End file.
